ATSAMD51 Custom Bootloader

Posted under DIY, Hacks, Technology on March 7th, 2021 by

Spending the birthday playing with this beauty of a controller. ATSAMD51J19 based Adafruit Feather M4. Its a blazingly fast ARM Cortex M4(120MHz) with 512KB flash and built-in 256 bit AES crypto engines and a full USB controller from @microchipmakes. Definitely a huge performance improvement from the SAMD21 series. Real-time processing seems a breeze. Also, you can overclock this controller to 200MHz. Never heard of a microcontroller being overclocked.

Trying to build a custom bootloader for this board with a fresh chip. Seems UF2 Bootloaders from @microsoft will allow you to use it as a USB device and you can use it with Arduino and CircuitPython, MakeCode to program it with the same bootloader are a rage with this one. Reading up a lot on those. @adafruit seems to have done a great job with it. Planning a custom compilation. Anyone having experience compiling UF2 bootloader from source on Windows(https://github.com/microsoft/uf2-samdx1) do reach out. Any help is appreciated. The documentation seems to be sparse. Seems @sparkfun also has a custom bootloader for their Thing Plus series with the same controller.

Thank you again for all the warm wishes for the day. Hope you have a great day ahead.

Edit: Figure out how to do a custom bootloader. Will write a detailed blog about it soon…

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TinyFPGA

Posted under DIY, Educational, Technology on January 24th, 2021 by

Back to FPGAs after a long time. Time to refresh the basics with this TinyFPGA board. Trying to get the toolchain up and running today. Maybe a small project soon. 😀

It’s an open source project with a Lattice FPGA iCE40LP8K-CM81 with 7,680 four-input look-up tables and 41 I/O pins. Has 8Mbit SPI Flash. Should be exciting to get started on this with an entirely open source toolchain.
Back when I was an undergraduate, all we had were expensive Xilinx boards and toolchains with no tutorials/guides anywhere. Had to reach out to Xilinx reps via phone to get some help to get it working(and beyond a point you needed to pay them). Oh, how this FPGA segment has exploded in the last few years. Has anyone played with these? Any small user project suggestions are welcome.

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