I think this can be said for MSP-430 in general. So should we drop support for it altogether (and thus also 16-bit platforms—we still have 8-bit support though)? The only boards remaining after the CC2420 removal would be the MSB-430 variants. I guess only @maribu has access to that, maybe some are still flying around at FU…
https://forum.riot-os.org/t/dropping-msp430-support-in-riot/2154
If you really want to, you can still get some eval boards and even TelosB (for an outrageous price).
We only have MSB-A2 and MSB-IoT boards at Magdeburg.
I have two MSP-EXP430FR5994 LaunchPad dev boards at home, as I was told that Inria was working on RIOT support for them. I tried to get hands on one of the supported MSP430 boards, but none of them are easy to get… If no one has them and no one can get them, we really should consider deprecating them.
But I would love to see support for one new MSP-430 board that can be obtained first to not drop the platform altogether. (How about the MSP-EXP430FR5994 since Inria already started to work on them?)
If we don’t drop the platform, keeping support for the boards should be the least hassle if they are still useful to some.
Someone from Inria did start working on this a while ago, but his contract ended 2 years ago, and this work was never taken over. So there is no one working at Inria on this ATM, AFAIK this PR is the only work so far.
@Kaspar you mention a branch of yours in that. Any chance that could be revived?
Sure! The branch compiles (well, compiled back then), but I don’t have the hardware to continue.
Hi there, is the CC430 (with mix of MSP430 and CC110 RF on a single chip) supported by the RIOT as such ? This was used in the Panstamp NRG boards, I still have a few of those.
From a more general perspective: Would it reduce maintaince, if RIOT OS only supports 32 Bit platforms all together? If so, it maybe makes sense to just focus on 32-Bit in general and not even having compatibility. I mean sure Arduino is a nice to have, but is it really that important or even usable? I started using RIOT on the ATMega and a lot of features weren’t supported. So, I eventually switched to the STM32F1. So, if that reduces maintainces and give you time for other things, I would just drop 8-Bit and 16-Bit support all together. I don’t see a lot RIOT loses with it.
AVR is going a bit off-topic here, but: We talked about this at length during the Virtual Open Assembly during this year’s summit. Basically, your user story was one of the main reasons, why we want to keep at least the AVR: every student marginally interested in Embedded stuff has some Arduino flying around at home. So this is typically the board they flash RIOT onto. Removing that would require to buy dedicated hardware, making the initial barrier of entry much higher.
Fully support that, even if I realise my voice is 100% noob. Arduino ATMEGA328 is a must-have, I would even recommend to add some tutorials explainign what you can and cannot do with it, so that people understand the limitations clearly
I have a couple in Inria, if someone is interested I could send one over.