Monday, November 28, 2011

Tiny Gecko ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h + Microchip Wifi Project update.

I finally got my 1.27mm headers in today. They were coming in from China after all.... I didn't pay a lot of attention when I ordered.

Anyways, to recap: the guys at Farnel hooked me up with this wifi board. I planned to use it with my Tiny Gecko demo board. The Microchip board is heavily geared toward using it with PIC processors, but they release the source code to a tcp/ip stack. My plan was to port the Microchip stack to run on the Gecko, shimming in Gecko-native SPI and interrupt code in place of the PIC code.

While I was waiting for my headers, I figured I'd start working on the port, so that when the headers arrived, I'd be almost ready to connect it to my Gecko. I got about 1/3 of the way into it, and realized I was doing more work than it was worth. I decided to scrap the idea of porting the code. I'm just going to use a PIC chip, and treat it like a high level tcp/ip "black box". I'll use a UART, or maybe SPI port to send and receive socket data, and let the PIC do all the heavy lifting. Hopefully, this means I can mostly use the Microchip code "out of the box", and make a simple serial messaging protocol. This also means I can also make it portable so that it's not just for the Gecko.

I just ordered a few PIC chips and a PICKIT 3. I had always planned to get around to exploring the PIC line of chips, but now I have a good excuse.

--P


No comments:

Post a Comment

I welcome you're thoughts. Keep it classy, think of the children.