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MCUdude / MegaCoreX

An Arduino hardware package for ATmega4809, ATmega4808, ATmega3209, ATmega3208, ATmega1609, ATmega1608, ATmega809 and ATmega808
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
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Any chance of integrating MegaCoreX into PlatformIO? #75

Closed tombull closed 4 years ago

tombull commented 4 years ago

Your MiniCore, MightyCore and MegaCore are available as frameworks in PlatformIO's platform-atmelavr platform. Have you got any plans to integrate MegaCoreX into PlatformIO's platform-atmelmegaavr platform? I would love to see this. Is there anything I can do to help? Is it something I could do myself? Any pointers on how to get started?

MCUdude commented 4 years ago

Cool surname! Exactly the same as mine, even though I'm Norwegian.

Is there anything I can do to help?

I did put in a lot of effort to get Mega/Mini/Mighty/Major/MicroCore support working like I wanted, and I worked together with the PlatformIO developers to create a script that could calculate and set the correct fuses, and another script that would load the right bootloader. I am planning to do this for MegaCoreX as well, but it's a little more work I believe.

Here are some thoughts though:

These a few small issues I'd like to fix before doing a new release. The release, however, will be "Ready for PlatformIO".

tombull commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the response - that sounds awesome! I had a look through the .py files in platform-atmelavr and platform-atmelmegaavr and figured I could make the changes required - at least for my purposes... but I was struggling to figure out how I would add a framework package for MegaCoreX - it figures that only the PlatformIO guys can do that! If you want any help when the PlatformIO guys have done their bit, then let me know!

MCUdude commented 4 years ago

If you want any help when the PlatformIO guys have done their bit, then let me know!

Thanks, I'll let you know! I will probably open an issue soon over at the PlatformIO megaavr repo to see if any of the developers have some spare time for this

tombull commented 4 years ago

There's already this issue... https://github.com/platformio/platform-atmelmegaavr/issues/2

MCUdude commented 4 years ago

PlatformIO support is now present!

tombull commented 4 years ago

Finally got a chance to test this today on a basic project... it's amazing, thank you so much!

In the time since I made the request, I have built my own build, library management system and CI system around arduino-cli with MegaCoreX... and it works OK, but not brilliantly. I'm really looking forward to transferring everything over to PlatformIO when I get some time.

Again, thanks so much for doing this work - it's going to make my programming life much better! And, of course, thank you for MegaCoreX - it's the basis of all of my projects for the ATmega4809, amazing work 👍

Quick question (probably not the right place to ask, sorry): do you have any experience programming boards with anything other than jtag2updi? All my projects are getting up to the 48K limit of the ATmega4809, and programming is pretty slow (20-30 seconds to program and verify) so I'd love to be able to program the boards faster. Also, step-through debugging would be amazing. Just got an Atmel-ICE, but it doesn't work at all on my Mac without some really hacky workarounds and testing with avrdude on windows just gives errors. Thought you might have some experience with other programmers and might be able to point me in the right direction?

MCUdude commented 4 years ago

Again, thanks so much for doing this work - it's going to make my programming life much better! And, of course, thank you for MegaCoreX - it's the basis of all of my projects for the ATmega4809, amazing work 👍

You're welcome! FYI most of the work was to make a foundation so it's easier to add other "megaAVR" cores such as megaTinyCore and hopefully DxCore in the future.

Quick question (probably not the right place to ask, sorry): do you have any experience programming boards with anything other than jtag2updi?

To be honest, I don't have much experience with jtag2updi, other than programming the Nano Every. My goto-programmer for <48kB UPDI chips is the microUPDI programmer, which I happen to sell on Tindie. It's running the latest version of the Atmel mEDBG firmware and works with Avrdude and Atmel Studio. It's not super fast, but it's reliable and also has built-in UART communication for simple debugging. I think breakpoint-debugging works too, but I haven't tried it.

All my projects are getting up to the 48K limit of the ATmega4809, and programming is pretty slow

Apparently, this is a limit or the old JTAG protocol jtag2updi is based on:

It's major limitation is speed; it can't go over 115200 Baud, because the protocol lacks definitions for higher speeds. It's actually inferior to the STK500v2 protocol in this respect, this older standard can run at any speed avrdude instructs it to.

You can probably increase the upload speed by using pyupdi. It's supported in PlatformIO!