I remember wishing for something like this that emitted C or C++ code a few years ago. Micropython is a fine choice, but very limiting. It's nearly impossible to do anything hard-realtime with it. But if it fits the nice, which is usually some flavor of a communication bus abstraction, this is probably a nice toy to play with. Curious how hard you can push the pedal on this.
Can it saturate the adc sampling? Can it configure a 20khz systick? Can it link interrupts together?
How easy is it to stand up uart/i2c/spi concurrently? What about canbus and usb?
How does it handle threaded programs? IS that part of the Node-RED arch? Or maybe micropy?
All very good questions. Which really have to be answered by real world testing.
On the subject of performance, there are really two points
- Microcontrollers are now a lot more powerful than they were, although clock speed isn't everything, an esp32s3 runs at 230Mhz and the RP2350(Rp Pico 2) can easily be clocked past 300 and have two cores.
- Also, MicroPython now supports two extra code emitters, Native and Viper, which create native code. They are already used on the spi display driver nodes and layout engine.
So I'm not sure it's as much a toy are you might think it is. OTOH, if this gets take up, I'd look at a lower level language.
Also, with AI somewhat more reliable now, making C/C++ addins is a much more reasonable proposition. Let me get this one tested and being used by folks and I'll think about how to create high speed paths :-)
At the end of the day, I'm trying to aim for use cases that aren't trying to squeeze the last drop of performance, but not toy use cases either.
I remember wishing for something like this that emitted C or C++ code a few years ago. Micropython is a fine choice, but very limiting. It's nearly impossible to do anything hard-realtime with it. But if it fits the nice, which is usually some flavor of a communication bus abstraction, this is probably a nice toy to play with. Curious how hard you can push the pedal on this.
Can it saturate the adc sampling? Can it configure a 20khz systick? Can it link interrupts together?
How easy is it to stand up uart/i2c/spi concurrently? What about canbus and usb?
How does it handle threaded programs? IS that part of the Node-RED arch? Or maybe micropy?
All very good questions. Which really have to be answered by real world testing.
On the subject of performance, there are really two points - Microcontrollers are now a lot more powerful than they were, although clock speed isn't everything, an esp32s3 runs at 230Mhz and the RP2350(Rp Pico 2) can easily be clocked past 300 and have two cores.
- Also, MicroPython now supports two extra code emitters, Native and Viper, which create native code. They are already used on the spi display driver nodes and layout engine.
So I'm not sure it's as much a toy are you might think it is. OTOH, if this gets take up, I'd look at a lower level language.
Also, with AI somewhat more reliable now, making C/C++ addins is a much more reasonable proposition. Let me get this one tested and being used by folks and I'll think about how to create high speed paths :-)
At the end of the day, I'm trying to aim for use cases that aren't trying to squeeze the last drop of performance, but not toy use cases either.