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microbit-foundation / microbit-firmata

Firmata-like or Firmata-light protocol to communicate with the micro:bit, initially over Serial
MIT License
15 stars 7 forks source link

Timeline and expectations? #5

Open gbraad opened 4 years ago

gbraad commented 4 years ago

Hi, I was wondering what the state of this is and what is expected over time?

I was planning to do a Tpescript implementation that runs on top of the MakeCode environment http://github.com/gbraad/pxt-firmata to allow for easier customization.

jaustin commented 4 years ago

Hi @gbraad from our point of view, this is in a good state to be used widely, and we welcome contributions to extend the functionality, but we don't plan to extend it directly until we have clear use-cases of things people want to do with it but can't. We are interested in considering extending it to work over the Bluetooth UART, but the great Bluetooth services make that less compelling/urgent right now.

I'd like to understand what you'd like to get out of a Typescript implementation? If you're interested in targeting other MakeCode-supported boards then it might be better to consider porting the C/C++ layer on top of CODAL, which is an evolution of the micro:bit DAL...

One of the goals for this was to be minimal in resource usage so that the applications driving firmata didn't hit out-of-memory errors, etc. We also wanted to be able to integrate very tightly with the micro:bit DAL for performance reasons, which meant using C/C++.

If your preference is about build tools, then perhaps we can work on making it easier to build this, for example in the mbed online IDE, or improving the build instructions.

gbraad commented 4 years ago

The idea to use typescript came before i knew this existed. The reason for typoscript was also to avoid the need for remote compilation and 'easier' to extend. I am not sure if other targets for makecode are even considered, as arcade is not a very formalized implementation; meowbit differs a lot from the adafruits boards which would mean there is not just the F4 and D5 targets.

gbraad commented 4 years ago

The idea of targeting mbed's online build environment sounds reasonable.