Serotonin must allow us to reprogram the entire tree of ATtiny861A's with minimal effort. Ideally, we could push a programming change to the root uC and have it propagated downwards to all of the others in a second or two.
We should consider using the debugWIRE interface to do these tasks. debugWIRE is a two-wire bidirectional protocol supported by the ATtiny861A's hardware. It permits a debugger to fill the device's memory, set breakpoints, jump to code, etc. I believe we could use a subset of this functionality quite simply to fill a device's memory with our program and start it executing.
This may eliminate the need to ever truly flash the devices with any real program, which would be lovely. They will need to be flashed once to turn on debugWIRE, but, after they are assembled into the Wookie suit, they will be just brainless zombies, waiting for the node above to fill them in and start them.
Serotonin must allow us to reprogram the entire tree of ATtiny861A's with minimal effort. Ideally, we could push a programming change to the root uC and have it propagated downwards to all of the others in a second or two.
We should consider using the debugWIRE interface to do these tasks. debugWIRE is a two-wire bidirectional protocol supported by the ATtiny861A's hardware. It permits a debugger to fill the device's memory, set breakpoints, jump to code, etc. I believe we could use a subset of this functionality quite simply to fill a device's memory with our program and start it executing.
This may eliminate the need to ever truly flash the devices with any real program, which would be lovely. They will need to be flashed once to turn on debugWIRE, but, after they are assembled into the Wookie suit, they will be just brainless zombies, waiting for the node above to fill them in and start them.