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The chips are out: http://www.microchip.com/design-centers/32-bit/architecture/pic32mz-da-family
I can agree, Linux can be a pain at times, but IMO its the best thing out there (until i get Hydrogen to a usable state
), at least for embedded/hobby stuff. Why put Linux on these chips? Its nice for routers/IoT i guess. I will tell more once i get the actual chips. I am also planning to port my OS to it.
Please, keep the discussion civilized, thanks. -
Linux is a big and long pole in the ass, everybody (including the big pig Banzi in Arduino) can jabber on bullshit about opensource, freedom
The answer to all this: use a stable kernel release and change that to match the project. Also never change to a different kernel version for a project. Newer isn't always better (if it ain't broken don't ruin it).
It's always this kind of shit from those who want to sell you something, but what matters is all the shitty code in linux is a big a long pole in the ass when *YOU* have to provide assistance.
Because you will not be paid enough for the effort you need to continuously-endlessly-incessantly-unceasingly-ceaselessly invest.
The code changes and it changes faster than you can metabolize, you need to stay "on the tree" more than the trains have to stay on rails.
If you don't, you derail, like when you have deal a kernel module written for kernel version A, which needs to be moved to kernel version B, and everything starts to break, and you have a deadline.
snip long story.... -
From what I can see - this is a better replacement for Intersil/TechWell video processors like TW8834 or so. Not sure about the price though.
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https://www.microchip.com/DevelopmentTools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=DM320008-C
Seems the processors run between 8 and 14 dollars depedning on what you get.
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I'm I being hopeful to think that there might be a ready to go linux port for the dev boards?
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I'm I being hopeful to think that there might be a ready to go linux port for the dev boards?
At least the mainline kernel source code is ready. I am not sure how the U-Boot side of things are. If I can get my hands on one I may start building a distro (based on Debian probably) -
Microchip Direct is showing that there are dev board systems avaialble for immediate purchase.
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This already exists in the form of the Xilinx Zynq. The development tools are much more mature.
Once you couple to an FPGA for vision, you have left the $5 Market. There are already $50 to $5000 FPGAs with embedded ARM chips that solve the problem.
As for the QFP.... That ship has sailed. Other than the Adafruit hobby market (who don't count in terms of sales), no one who does real work cares it is a BGA.
Yeah... when I saw the octavo part recently my first thought was "damn... I want a zynq one of these!" Actually I am meant to be developing a simple zynq SOM for a friend of mine, with extremely minimal peripherals.... because there's not any good low cost options out there for a product he's making... all the existing zynq SOMs are trying to do too much from his point of view and contain stuff that's a waste of money. Now if someone put a zynq 7020 with a bit of RAM in a nice relaxed pitch BGA, it would basically be exactly what he needed and I wouldn't have to design anything. :-)
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Microchip Direct is showing that there are dev board systems avaialble for immediate purchase.
...with the internal RAM?
that one linked above has external DRAM. (and costs $140 for a dev board!!! that's a bit steeper than a beaglebone black wireless or a beaglebone blue, which are basically dev boards for the octavo systems part) -
I think there will soon be a version of those chips with U-Boot in mask ROM option alongside the version with Flash memory. Folks that uses Linux will be able to start directly with the read-only copy of U-Boot, put their code in QSPI, and make the system get up and go in no time. Macronix even provides QSPI-compatible mask ROM chips...
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Microchip Direct is showing that there are dev board systems avaialble for immediate purchase.
...with the internal RAM?
that one linked above has external DRAM. (and costs $140 for a dev board!!! that's a bit steeper than a beaglebone black wireless or a beaglebone blue, which are basically dev boards for the octavo systems part)
That's why i'm waiting for olimex' board -
...with the internal RAM?
http://www.microchip.com/Developmenttools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=DM320010 $130 and lots in stock.
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Microchip Direct is showing that there are dev board systems avaialble for immediate purchase.
...with the internal RAM?
that one linked above has external DRAM. (and costs $140 for a dev board!!! that's a bit steeper than a beaglebone black wireless or a beaglebone blue, which are basically dev boards for the octavo systems part)
That's why i'm waiting for olimex' board
The problem with dev boards is that they're pretty useless without a vendor supported board support package. So while the Microchip dev boards might not seem cheap, at least you won't spend days pissing about trying to make a non-standard board blink an LED.
OK, I'm being a tad dramatic, but I'm sure you get my point!
(But of course, you will get to spend weeks and months pissing about with Harmony instead) -
Microchip Direct is showing that there are dev board systems avaialble for immediate purchase.
...with the internal RAM?
that one linked above has external DRAM. (and costs $140 for a dev board!!! that's a bit steeper than a beaglebone black wireless or a beaglebone blue, which are basically dev boards for the octavo systems part)
That's why i'm waiting for olimex' board
The problem with dev boards is that they're pretty useless without a vendor supported board support package. So while the Microchip dev boards might not seem cheap, at least you won't spend days pissing about trying to make a non-standard board blink an LED.
OK, I'm being a tad dramatic, but I'm sure you get my point!
(But of course, you will get to spend weeks and months pissing about with Harmony instead)
IN deed. And its great to be able to try somethign and have a reletive amount of confidnce that the board/hardware is ok.. do it on your own board and you have all those complications.. Its hard debugging multiple thigns simulateonly.. However they are expensive but its only a hour or twos time. so its probalby cheap.
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The problem with dev boards is that they're pretty useless without a vendor supported board support package. So while the Microchip dev boards might not seem cheap, at least you won't spend days pissing about trying to make a non-standard board blink an LED.
OK, I'm being a tad dramatic, but I'm sure you get my point!
(But of course, you will get to spend weeks and months pissing about with Harmony instead)
of course, but i didn't say "random ebay listing", did i?
i'd get a microchip one but AT LEAST include the display in a demo/devboard for a part with a display controller -
Heres a copy of the email i had from someone at MicrochipQuote
Hi Andrew,
While the PIC32MZDA chips are starting to enter the wild officially today [1], Microchip is currently not officially supporting Linux on these processors (not to be confused with the processors technically supporting Linux). It is likely that community support will get energized to continue to support a Linux ecosystem on these processors, but this has yet to materialize. I am closely monitoring and am personally interested in such a situation.
I would encourage you to take a look at the SAM9x5/SAMA5 ARM parts that Microchip does officially support Linux on [2,3]. Linux support for these parts is very mature, they have more horsepower than PIC32MZDA while still being very low power, and inevitably there will be a bright, reinforced future for these lines of processors. This is where all of our Linux focus is right now.
[1] https://www.microchip.com/pressreleasepage/microchip-introduces-PIC32MZDA
[2] http://www.at91.com/linux4sam/bin/view/Linux4SAM
[3] http://www.microchip.com/design-centers/32-bit-mpus
Josh
From:
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 6:14 PM
To: Joshua Henderson - C16205
Subject: PIC32MZDA Linux.
Hi Joshua,
I found your repo https://github.com/joshua-henderson/linux-pic32 Now that the DA chips are available and the Dev Boards are as well, could you tell me what the status of Linux on these things is? I see that the git repo’s when quiet about a year ago.. Any information would be greatly appreciated. -
Heres a copy of the email i had from someone at Microchip
Quote
Hi Andrew,
While the PIC32MZDA chips are starting to enter the wild officially today [1], Microchip is currently not officially supporting Linux on these processors (not to be confused with the processors technically supporting Linux). It is likely that community support will get energized to continue to support a Linux ecosystem on these processors, but this has yet to materialize. I am closely monitoring and am personally interested in such a situation.
I would encourage you to take a look at the SAM9x5/SAMA5 ARM parts that Microchip does officially support Linux on [2,3]. Linux support for these parts is very mature, they have more horsepower than PIC32MZDA while still being very low power, and inevitably there will be a bright, reinforced future for these lines of processors. This is where all of our Linux focus is right now.
[1] https://www.microchip.com/pressreleasepage/microchip-introduces-PIC32MZDA
[2] http://www.at91.com/linux4sam/bin/view/Linux4SAM
[3] http://www.microchip.com/design-centers/32-bit-mpus
Josh
From:
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 6:14 PM
To: Joshua Henderson - C16205
Subject: PIC32MZDA Linux.
Hi Joshua,
I found your repo https://github.com/joshua-henderson/linux-pic32 Now that the DA chips are available and the Dev Boards are as well, could you tell me what the status of Linux on these things is? I see that the git repo’s when quiet about a year ago.. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
That means the Linux support on PIC32MZ DA/EF is community only. -
The big advantage of the DA with the embedded memory is that its largely all contained.. Add a clock, power, I/O, ethernet or usb if you need, and your done. The Arm based processors need DRAM attached on the side and that does complicate things and size..
So the repo's are there, where is the 'community' that will will get Linux up on this IC. -
The big advantage of the DA with the embedded memory is that its largely all contained.. Add a clock, power, I/O, ethernet or usb if you need, and your done. The Arm based processors need DRAM attached on the side and that does complicate things and size..
And There is this oddball called Allwinner V3s which comes with its own embedded DRAM.
It is a bit too sad that there isn't any any QFP ARM processors with a PoP DRAM. -
The big advantage of the DA with the embedded memory is that its largely all contained.. Add a clock, power, I/O, ethernet or usb if you need, and your done. The Arm based processors need DRAM attached on the side and that does complicate things and size..
I use a PIC32MZ EF part in a couple of products. I am personally excited for the DA.
The reason? Exactly what you said... I get up to 2MB flash, 32MB of RAM, and a fast SD Card controller in a TQFP package. Although, I might have to reconsider the BGA package since the pitch on the BGA isn't all that bad - inspection/rework sucks though.
On the hardware side, the engineering is much easier.... I don't have to deal with DDR routing. I have an onboard ethernet MAC, USB phy, etc. I've looked at lots of processors over the years and I just haven't been able to find any other processor which is both the combination of easy to design with, easy to assemble, and has the features I need.
In short, the hardware engineering for a PIC32 isn't much worse than any other PIC that I've ever dealt with. In the PIC32MZ family I get 200MPS, hardware crypto and floating point, lots of memory, low power consumption, etc. For my application this is perfect. The DA parts gain me so much more for not a lot more money than I'm paying for the EF parts. I have a product coming up soon that for the advanced versions of the product, I was worried about fitting the entire design in the EF, so this might fit just fine. I AM going to wait a bit before committing after having been bit with the EC issue.
People like to whine about Harmony. They also like to whine about MPLAB X and the XC compilers, and well, everything else. For me, I don't see what the big problem is. There's been a few bugs, but no show stoppers in recent harmony versions. If you're trying to use harmony to build some 'next to the hardware' application or something which requires medical grade reliability, then harmony isn't for you. If instead, you're looking for a decent TCP/IP and USB stack engineered for a resource constrained system, it really isn't that bad. Use harmony for what it's good at and write your own code for what it isn't.
I totally get why Linux is attractive though. I just don't feel that this part was designed for that application in mind. -
People like to whine about Harmony. They also like to whine about MPLAB X and the XC compilers, and well, everything else. For me, I don't see what the big problem is. There's been a few bugs, but no show stoppers in recent harmony versions. If you're trying to use harmony to build some 'next to the hardware' application or something which requires medical grade reliability, then harmony isn't for you. If instead, you're looking for a decent TCP/IP and USB stack engineered for a resource constrained system, it really isn't that bad. Use harmony for what it's good at and write your own code for what it isn't.
Linux for some folks works as an escape from Harmony, and it comes with so many optional drivers a lot of groundwork have been done for you in that respective. Also it does means that the actual application can be developed in a wider choice of languages (since not all language can operate on near bare metal environment.) This may be the first microcontroller capable of running a full version of Python or Ruby or Lua or Scala or Clojure or Swift.
I totally get why Linux is attractive though. I just don't feel that this part was designed for that application in mind. -
...with the internal RAM?
http://www.microchip.com/Developmenttools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=DM320010 $130 and lots in stock.
Ordered two yesterday, and they just arrived on my desk! -
...with the internal RAM?
http://www.microchip.com/Developmenttools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=DM320010 $130 and lots in stock.
Ordered two yesterday, and they just arrived on my desk!
Please post about it! -
Mine ordered today..