I have finally produced a first board to test my rpic solution. At this stage I have only completely tested half of the circuit, the one related to the control of the ucontroller and the interface with 4 buttons. There is another part of the circuit, basically copied from and Application Note from NXP to isolate the I2C bus. This is intended to be used to capture power consumption at the boosters and other parts of the layout – still not developed.
The firmware has not changed, which means that the use of the programing track is still not available… I have neither completed all the functionalities for the program commands.
As usual, the code repository has been updated
One interesting addition is a script to update the firmware from the raspberry pi. The script is from Daniel Perron and I have just updated it to support the 16f1825 (which does not support in some revisions a basic erase command ). In the long term, it would be interesting to migrate the script from python to c, in order to integrate it with the daemon.
On the other hand, the daemon needs further work. Now that there is a reference implementation of rocnet, natural next step is to migrate and stop using the rpic library I created for testing. In this way, the rpic will be able to communicate with any rocrail server using rocnet… and I think rocnet is now supporting most of the things I was missing when I started this project.
Development is slow – I nearly have time for the hobby – but progressing.