Thoughts on Chip's original P2 IDE(a)
markaeric
Posts: 282
While I think it's wise that the P2 ROM will be stripped down to just a bootloader and encryption engine, this doesn't eliminate it from being it's own self-hosting environment. Various discussions on the forums has got my mind whirring over the possibilities and benefits of such a capability.
The P2 is shaping up to be a very potent computer-on-chip, especially now with an SDRAM interface, and improved LMM support. So, it should certainly have all the right stuff to make a lot of things possible, such as...
The official hardware platform and development system. One single device to develop on, test on, and program other chips with. That hardware could be similar to the Propeller Demo Board, add SDRAM, ethernet, 2 SD readers, and a bunch of GPIO which could be useful for function generating, and/or logic analyzing.
Besides programming directly on the board via keyboard/mouse and VGA, Phil Pilgrim brought up a very interesting idea using a browser based programming GUI. The web host could be the development board itself, which could allow for some interesting possibilities such as a seamless OBEX, app note, and firmware update interface (among plenty of other things).
Though it might be a bigger undertaking than creating an Eclipse and GCC tool set, the large amount of useful P2 code that would be generated from such an project (assuming it's open source) would provide a great code repository base that would benefit developers and Parallax. Parallax is going to have to write a ton of code for the chip anyways, so why not kill two birds with one stone.
The P2 is shaping up to be a very potent computer-on-chip, especially now with an SDRAM interface, and improved LMM support. So, it should certainly have all the right stuff to make a lot of things possible, such as...
The official hardware platform and development system. One single device to develop on, test on, and program other chips with. That hardware could be similar to the Propeller Demo Board, add SDRAM, ethernet, 2 SD readers, and a bunch of GPIO which could be useful for function generating, and/or logic analyzing.
Besides programming directly on the board via keyboard/mouse and VGA, Phil Pilgrim brought up a very interesting idea using a browser based programming GUI. The web host could be the development board itself, which could allow for some interesting possibilities such as a seamless OBEX, app note, and firmware update interface (among plenty of other things).
Though it might be a bigger undertaking than creating an Eclipse and GCC tool set, the large amount of useful P2 code that would be generated from such an project (assuming it's open source) would provide a great code repository base that would benefit developers and Parallax. Parallax is going to have to write a ton of code for the chip anyways, so why not kill two birds with one stone.
Comments
Your connection between a web-aware IDE and the OBEX is inspired! There's no reason the OBEX itself could not serve as a library folder.
-Phil