ESP32

[mobyfab]

Hi guys,

So there's this new MCU that was just released, from the same company as the famous ESP8266.
It's a dual core running at 160MHz, tons of ram and (external) flash, lots of peripherals. It's perfect for a full IOT solution.
Right now there's support for FreeRTOS, it would be nice to port it to ChibiOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32

[Giovanni]

Hi,

Interesting but it would be a major endeavour, especially creating an HAL. Boards, compiler and debuggers would required, is there open source support?

Integrated wireless interfaces is great anyway.

Giovanni

[mobyfab]

The SDK is open source

Here: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf
OpenOCD support: https://github.com/espressif/openocd-esp32

The wifi and bluetooth libs are still provided as binaries.

[avrhack]

Yeah I'd love to see ChibiOS on this although as Giovanni says it's a major undertaking. Although the SDK is open source as mobyfab indicated, I believe there are major parts of the overall environment that are closed by Espressif so not sure how feasible it would be.....

[inca]

Well, the code for FreeRTOS HAL is open source, so it cannot be too hard. =)

I would also like to see this as well.

I have been away from this scene for a bit, though I may take the first steps as a fun exercise for getting back in touch with ChibiOS and learning a new MCU. When I look at it later tonight I'll keep in touch over on the irc @ #chibios. Cheers!

[Giovanni]

Hi,

Supporting new MCU families involves finding people working on them, are you volunteering ?

Giovanni

[davidbuzz]

I'm a competent esp32 developer, and an ardupilot developer ( runs on chibios), and would love to see chibios ported to esp32, but the low-level bring-up is beyond my skills to do on my own... is there a chat channel where we could try as a group to do this..?

[davidbuzz]

... there is clearly interest elsewhere too... eg: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/issues/7751

[Giovanni]

Hi,

If there is a group willing to give it a try then I could provide a forum area and try to support the effort. Getting started with simple drivers should not be a huge effort. The plan is simple:

1) Make a clock tree initialization, it does not need to be fully configurable initially.
2) Make a PAL driver, easy usually.
3) Make a serial driver, easy usually.
4) Make a simple demo running the test suite on serial output (the same you see for STM32).

Now you have the bare minimum for a "supported platform". From here you can decide on which drivers to invest your time, the hard ones are USB and Ethernet.

Do you need to support a specific device or a whole family? the latter can be more complex, see the STM32 source tree, there are hundreds of those.

Giovanni

[davidbuzz]

A forum area, and whatnot sounds great. I'm in. Who else?