It could work if the data was stored in flash. But without support from the UI library...

is the theory that you'd stream a small amount from flash into RAM, then pump it out to the display, then overwrite the allocated part of RAM from the flash, and repeat

The UI library paints the display block by block. The display library must provide the data as requested. If the data is in flash, it would just read it from there whenever needed.

esp32c6-no-ble is building.

I have a crazy idea to try to port Toit and the whole VM system to an ARMv7 embedded board with NAND flash and a bunch of peripherals: the Nest 2nd Gen thermostat, which has a USB DFU boot mode. We have a full Linux kernel for it and plenty of drivers for the various hardware, and I had actually been working on a new PCB hardware replacement powered by ESP32 instead of trying the software route - but I want to give a shot to both options. Have you experimented with running Toit bare-metal on an ARM SoC?

Specifically, it's the Texas Instruments AM3703CUS Sitara ARM Cortex A8

Short answer: Yes - depending of your definition of bare metal 🙂

We've been using FreeRTOS on ARM - just like we do on ESPs.

so my main challenge is getting FreeRTOS compiled and flashed on the device first, and then adding the Toit layer?

Freertos is an embedded OS. Programs are bundled with it. The challenge is to compile Toit together with freertos to obtain a firmware image that can be flashed.

Edit: wrong channel. Copying to general.

I inherited a big bundle of STM32s and I am considering trying to port Toit there

So - tiny ARM Linux, STM32, I just like the language a lot and want its paradigms on other boards heh

First of all, thanks! I have been working on a port to an arm chip for several weeks now. I would recommend waiting for that one to land first. A lot of things should be much easier after that. If you tell me which stm32 I can try to get one and port it next. No guarantees on the timeline though. I'm currently waiting on Fable to become available again and vacations are coming soon too.

well specifically ARMv7 embedded board with NAND flash - Texas Instruments AM3703CUS Sitara ARM Cortex A8 - the one I mentioned over the wintertime for the ARM one for the STM32, it's the STM32G473VE https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32g473ve.html

512 Kbytes of flash memory, and 128 Kbytes of SRAM will be tough

Espressif is releasing a new μ-controller, the esp32-s31. Is there a plan to port Toit for this chip? https://viewedisplay.com/esp32-s31-espressif-new-generation-mainstream-aiot-chip/

Yes. The plan is to support it. But first I need to clean up the P4 support. And typically new chips require updates if the esp-idf. Something we want to do anyway, but those can sometimes take a bit of time (depending on how much they changed).

👍

I remember chatter about toit and raspberry pis before, and found a reference to pi pointing to the envelope repo? However looking there I dont see anything currently. Where is the best place these days to look for anything about toit on pis?

If I remember correctly, you can use

"arm-linux"

for the

firmware-envelope

setting in your Artemis json files (the pod specifications) - and use that to build/extract a small bundle that you can run on your Raspberry Pi.

I also have a hard time finding documentation for it 🥴

There is some stuff here: https://discord.com/channels/918498540232253480/918498540232253483/1250707928386633739

that sounds ideal, and I will be trying it shortly! in verry happy to be having toit on my pc now talking to toit on the esp in our device, which talks to our STM and then talks to our go code, and all the way back through the pipeline 😄

First time I have used toit running on the host for a real project rather than just one off tests

Unrelated to toit, but I just saw https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/connect/ which is neat

Some of our Toit users use Artemis for the raspberry pi.

I was giving that a go, ended up running into boring normal rpi issues with wifi, perhaps the 2 I have here have actually suffered an unfortunate death

What generations are they? I had issues once with a 5 which were weirdly solved with the firmware update procedure.. Worth a shot maybe!

It was rpi 5! And we got them pretty early on and haven't used them since!