snek-mega

Thu, 02 May 2019 20:45:35 -0700
tags/snek

Snek on the Arduino Mega 2560 Rev3

The Arduino Mega 2560 Rev3 is larger in almost all ways than the ATmega328P based Arduino boards. Based on the ATMega 2560 SoC, the Mega has 256K of flash, 8K of RAM and 4K of EEPROM. The processor and peripherals are compatible with the ATMega 328P making supporting this in Snek pretty easy.

ATMega238P to ATMega2560 changes

All that I needed to do for Snek to compile for the Mega was to adjust the serial port code to use the Mega register names. gcc-avr prefixes all of the USART registers with 'USART0' for the 2560 instead of 'USART'. With that change, Snek came right up on the board.

GPIO Changes

To get the Arduino Mega pins all working, I had to add definitions for all 70 of them. That's a lot of pins! I took the definitions from the Arduino sources and matched up all of the PWM outputs as well.

USB Serial Adventures

The Arduino Duemilanove uses an FTDI USB to Serial converter chip, while the Arduino Mega uses an ATmega 16u2 SoC. The FTDI exposes a custom USB device while the ATmega16u2 implements a standard CDC ACM device.

The custom USB device provides full serial control, including support for selecting XON/XOFF flow control. The CDC ACM standard only exposes configuration for RTS/CTS flow control, but doesn't provide any way to ask for XON/XOFF flow control.

The Arduino programming protocol requires a transparent 8-bit data path; because the CDC ACM standard doesn't provide a way to turn XON/XOFF on and off, the ATmega 16u2 never does XON/XOFF.

Snek needs XON/XOFF flow control to upload and download code over the serial link.

I was hoping to leave the ATmega 16u2 code and ATmega 2560 boot loader alone. This would let people use Snek on the Arduino Mega without needing a programming puck. And, in fact, Snek works just fine. But, you can't use Snekde with the Mega because getting and putting code to the device ends up with corrupted data.

So, I changed the ATmega 16u2 code to enable XON/XOFF whenever the baud rate is below 57600 baud, left Snek running at 38400 baud while the boot loader uses 115200 baud. The result is that when Snek runs, there is XON/XOFF flow control, and when the boot loader runs, there is not.

Results

With the extra ROM, I was able to include all of the math functions. With the extra RAM, the heap can be 6kB. So much space!