[time-nuts] PICTIC II ready-made?

Dennis Ferguson dennis.c.ferguson at gmail.com
Fri Apr 27 03:31:36 UTC 2012


On 27 Apr, 2012, at 02:57 , Chris Albertson wrote:
> Closed source drivers and "binary blob" firmware.    I'd have nothing to do
> with a project that includes either of those. I'd require a open source
> platforms with a 100% free tool chain.   Also, it is a bit of overkill
> after all a bare PIC works fine for this application.

The only thing "binary blob" about the Raspberry Pi that I can see seems
to be the stuff associated with the graphics accelerator.  This is unfortunate,
but unless you are into bare-metal programming of high resolution graphics/video
(you can do that with an Arduino?) I'm not quite sure how that is relevant.

The programming interfaces for all peripherals on the SoC not associated with the
GPU seem to be well documented in the Broadcom data sheet:

   http://www.designspark.com/files/ds/supporting_materials/Broadcom%20BCM2835.pdf

I don't know of anything useful which is missing, and I know a port of a non-Linux
operating system (NetBSD) to the board is being done using nothing that is non-public.
You can leave the graphics "binary blob" out if you find that offensive and have no
use for it anyway.

I think the most annoying thing about the Raspberry Pi is that a lot of the GPIO
signals aren't brought out to connectors, perhaps to save money on the board.

Dennis Ferguson


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