Another possible target for Engine Basic ?

andibyte

A nice little board for 11€ shipped worldwide :

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/PK-OrangePi-NanoPi-Raspberry-Pie-GX6605S-Entwicklung-Bord-F-r-C-SKY-Linux/32960008762.html

It runs a linux kernel, has modern HDMI for video out, 2 x USB, 64 MB RAM and 4 MB SPI FLASH to boot from.
It even has a STM32 as JTAG debugger onbard.

Review:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/11/12/c-sky-linux-development-board-gx6605s-media-soc/

It's as cheap as the ESP8266 based Basic Engine, but nothing to solder, ready to go.
While it uses an exotic architecture, it runs a basic linux kernel. So it should basicaly support any USB hardware you throw at it.
I think they have some barebones framework also, if you want to skip linux.
The chip is cheap and has hand solderable pins, so it should be possible to do a custom board if someone wants to.

uli

That's quite neat, especially since it has upstream Linux support.

Porting Engine BASIC to any Linux platform should be quite straightforward. In fact, I use a Linux build for debugging all the time. This "hosted build" lacks a few features (beeper sound, full VS23 emulation, non-US keyboard layout, external hardware access), but those aren't insurmountable problems.

I'll get myself one of those and have a look at it, but as always, don't hold your breath. ?

pdxiv

uli I see that you've been working with some code for Orange Pi with Allwinner H3. Are you working with a particular model? Is it possible to share some of your progress, for those of us who are interested?

uli

I'm using the Orange Pi One. I have a Lite here as well, but I haven't tried that yet. The H3 is inflexible enough in terms of pin mapping that board designs cannot differ much, though, so it may well work with other boards.

If you want to try it, you can check out the opi branch of https://github.com/uli/allwinner-bare-metal/tree/opi for a bare-metal H3 runtime that I have improved slightly by adding file system, SD driver, USB stack, HDMI audio and a few other bits and pieces. Use crosstool-ng.config to build a toolchain, then run make.

In the basicengine-firmware repo, use the stdio branch (more on that below) and change the variable OSDIR in Makefile.h3 to point to the bare-metal directory, then run make h3.

To upload the resulting binary via USB, power up the OPi into FEL mode (i.e. without a bootable SD card in the slot), then run make -f Makefile.h3 install. It should also be possible to use u-boot to load and start the binary at 0x5c000000.

The stdio branch is called that way because I attempt to convert all file access to stdio in order to make porting the firmware to other platforms as porting external code to the firmware easier. It also replaces arduino-builder with a Makefile for both ESP32 and ESP8266 because OMG I hate that crap.

I have not yet found the time to check if these two changes break anything on the original platform, so I haven't merged it back into master yet.