[Oberon] Pepino LX9, USB, and other hardware running OBERON

[Bill Buzzell]

Please forgive me for speaking way to vaguely on this important subject. I went into bit of a rant and was speaking in a very generalized way.

First, I blatantly suggested that USB should be totally avoided. I should have been more specific and said 'it should be excluded from everything except RS232/UART access'. This is how we have it now via the FTDI chip. In fact, Magnus seems to know his stuff with these chips and has quite a solid foundation going in this department, code wise. I vividly remember when he did an upgrade to this code and I saw the uploads speeds double. IIRC he duplexed the UARTS, was it? The difference was quite impressive.

So what we have is a perfect setup now for USB: interfaced via RS232 and no further. That is spot on with the simplicity of Oberon, it appears. Of coarse, if you need lot's of throughput, like Wojetek does, this is a major issue.

Question: why not simply use the two UARTS on the FT2xx chip on the Pipistrello/Pepino? Currently this chip is only used for loading the flash memory for the boot loader. Wojtek, why not utilize this chip's UART's in your design at 'run time'. Add some UART's to the Verilog design, jumper the correct pins from the FTDI chip and bam, ProjectOberon now has USB. Will two high speed UARTS provide enough throughput? Am I missing something here? This is simply suggested as a potential workaround/variant on the side, not suggesting this should be standard or in the 'official' distribution, of coarse.

Also, concerning the ESP8266, it is quite promising but there are some things to consider. It is a proprietary chip. This means that someone must convince the manufacturer to be smart and fund/back the development of an Oberon target compiler for the ESP8266. Short of that, you would have to design and manufacture your own boards, plus you would have to buy a license to the Soc design from Cadence.

And lastly, my statements on the $5 computer were very 'generic'. I just threw the ESP8266 out as an example. It is clearly not the best candidate for this. But my point was is that whatever they are building these $5 toys with simply needs someone to build a small Oberon based OS equivalent for them with the knowledge gained from ProjectOberon. I believe they are mostly ARM M0's, aren't they? Astrobe has proven that Oberon is an excellent match for the ARM 3, 4 and 5 already.

Regards,
Bill


"Bill,

I also am in favour of stripping away the USB - it really only makes sense
when you want to communicate with a PC and power the board with a fairly
stable 5V supply.

FTDI have produced USB to serial interface devices for about 10 years - and
this is very convenient for connecting low resource microcontrollers that
perhaps only have a (TTL) UART for serial comms.

You can now get a USB to serial VCP IC that runs at 3Mbaud  and costs less
than 50 cents.

Regarding implementation on an ESP8266:

Whilst the current ESP8266 is a capable chip  (80-160MHz 32 bit) with only
20% of it's MIPS taken up with the WiFi stack, it might not have sufficient
RAM available on chip (<36Kbytes) to support a full Oberon application.

This begs the question about an "Oberon Lite" implementation - which I
guess is what Chris Burrows has implemented for various ARM and FPGA
platforms.

There's a new ESP device, the ESP32, currently in beta testing which has
about 400Kbytes of RAM

https://harizanov.com/2015/12/esp32/


This could make a very attractive platform for an IOT system or pocket WiFi
workstation.

It is only the mass-market applications that will bring Oberon to the
forefront - and the idea of a complete lightweight OS that resides in under
1Mbyte - makes it attractive for IoT devices that really do not need to
carry around 20 million lines of source-code baggage.

However to develop these applications, we need Oberon platforms  - and NW,
Paul Reed (& co) Chris B and Magnus are doing their best to furnish us with
usable hardware.

Ken"