The latest design of the Virtual 2315 Cartridge Facility's Power Distribution Board is now ready to use. The PCBs arrived yesterday and I built two of them today. This board handles the routing of power from battery, IBM 1130 main power supply, ride-through time delay relay, battery charger/maintainer out to the power supply board for the V2315CF.
It also provides for detection of loss of 1130 power, triggering the V2315CF to store the contents of a virtual cartridge back on the microSD card media. This preserves any data written to a virtual cartridge whenever an orderly unload is not completed before power is lot.
RASPBERRY PI PICO TOOLCHAIN CONTINUES TO CAUSE NEEDLESS PAIN AND DELAY
The V2315CF main unit has an FPGA and a Raspberry Pi Pico which cooperate to provide the functionality. I use a couple of toolchains for the FPGA, Vivado and IceCube2, but need a way to compile the C code for the Pico. Putatively the straightforward way to compile the code is to use Visual Studio Code with some extensions provided by the Raspberry Pi people.
I have slammed my head, figuratively, into a wall trying to get this Visual Studio route to work for me. Since I was developing another project using Raspberry Pi 5 units, which run under Debian Linux, I was able to use an alternate process to compile the code under Raspbian (Debian for Pi).
Once I completed the other project, I moved the Raspberry Pi 5 unit to my workshop. The design I created on the Pi 5 included a locked down networking environment to work only at the Museum where the units are installed. This means that the unit does not easily connect to the Internet, plus I don't have internet access at the workshop. I can use my iPhone to create a wifi network in the shop, but the Pi still would need to have all its networking hardcoded configurations removed to make use of the connection.
All I wanted to do was to compile changes to the Pico code, using the Pi 5 which had done this successfully for weeks before. However, suddenly the toolchain decided it needed a new version of a bit of code (Picotool) and attempted in vain to pull it down from Github. I can't get it to compile any more because it is obsessed with this sudden need to update the tool.
Whether I fight my way to success with Windows and Visual Studio Code, or I fight my way to success unraveling all the networking configuration changes of the Pi 5, it will mean wasted time and annoyance. Toolchains - the bane of my existence. Imagine if a screwdriver or a hammer were to suddenly refuse to work. Documentation, guides and how-tos often fail to help because the toolchain code in question is frequently morphing, changing from the version used when writing the guides.
Not a huge headache, but more inefficiency and waste of my time that could have been invested in developing new projects or refining existing ones.
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