During my tinkering over the past two weeks, I hit a snag while trying to hook up the LPC824 µC to the Arduino IDE. Nothing spectacular or insurmountable, but still…

This week, I have two articles for you, explaining what this is all about:

• Serial uploads vs flow control – Wed
• Revisiting existing chips and code – Thu

Warning: there are going to be some changes w.r.t. where I’ll be going next…

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Let’s get that upload going. Remember, this is about adding a “hardware platform” to the Arduino IDE so it can compile and upload files to a Tinker Pico, based on the LPC824 µC.

There are two parts to this: 1) getting all the IDE setup files right so that it knows how to compile & upload, and 2) implementing pinMode(), digitalWrite(), etc. so they can be used with LPC824 microcontrollers in the same way as with ATmega’s and other µC’s.

So let’s tackle these issues one by one, shall we?

• Compile and upload the bare minimum – Wed
• Using an LPC824 the Arduino way – Thu

Here’s my very first compile and upload to a Tinker Pico:

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What will it take to support the LPC824 µC, i.e. the Tinker Pico, from the Arduino IDE?

As the Arduino IDE has been evolving and growing over the years, more and more µC platforms have been added – both officially and unofficially – after the initial ATmega µC’s. One of the earlier ones was Energia, which was created as a fork to support TI’s MSP430 chips, but as the IDE matured, it has become easier to support several other architectures in the mainstream build as a simple add-on, such as ESP8266 and STM32.

Sooo… let’s try and find out how hard it would be to include our LPC824 µC into the mix:

• Adding a new Arduino platform – Wed
• Extending the “ide-hardware” project – Thu

Update: the following two articles are postponed to next week. Sorry for the bad planning:

• A quick hack to make it compile – Fri
• Uploading via the IDE – Sat

So far, this is merely an exploration, as I said. A complete port will take considerably more effort. I’m also considering moving a bit beyond the digitalRead/Write conventions…

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It’s time to get some new hardware out the door, which I’ve been doodling with here at JeeLabs for quite some time, and which some of you might like to tinker with as well.

The first new board is the Tinker Pico, which was already pre-announced a while ago. Here’s the final PCB, which is being sent off to production now, soon to appear in the shop:

As before, each week consists of one announcement like this, and one or more articles with further details, ready for release on successive days of the week – three in this case:

• Tinker Pico v1 – Wed
• How to upload over FTDI – Thu
• Writing code for the Tinker Pico – Fri

This is merely a first step, running pretty basic demo code. Stay tuned for more options…

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