So, in another thread on this forum, user @lersi brought up the naming convention. After trying to wrap my head around the firmware builds, I kind of see his point. Here we have what is essentially a single firmware base being used on three variations of a basic hardware design. The firmware has so much in common between BP5, BP5XL, and BP6, the status quo of all three firmware in a single repo makes perfect sense. The mental stumbling block, for me, was that the firmware repo is named BP5. That clearly includes BP5 and BP5XL, but the BP6 build is an oddball.
The hardware naming is an interesting one to me, who has a decades-long love/hate relationship with engineering drawings, part numbers and such. These modules are somewhat more than minor PCB assembly options, like different memory sizes for example. The main MCU changes between 5 and 5XL/6, and major new functionality is possible with 6 only. I can see the argument for the initial, 10-minute naming convention as well as the @lersi naming scheme. I don’t have a strong opinion either way, other than to say…
- If you keep the current naming scheme, the I think it would make sense to rename the repository to something like
firmware-rp2. - If you go with the 5/5A/5B scheme, the existing firmware repo name is just fine.
As for final documentation down the road, could you put something in the Makefile or readme to show a list of boards and targets, like a help option? If you put something in the Makefile, it can be done so that it is basically self-updating when you add targets / boards. But you need to know the target in order to run cmake which creates the Makefile. Putting it in the readme solves this problem, but you have to manually update it whenever there are changes.
I offer these comments not as actual recommendations, but just as food for thought as the 5XL/6 becomes official and not just beta. Rereading what @Ian wrote last week puts these 5XL/6 hiccups into a better perspective as well:
5 (rp2040) is absolutely the “main” bus pirate for the foreseeable future. We haven’t run into resource or speed limits with the RP2040, and it’s a well proven chip…No one should feel like their 5 is obsolete, it’s what I currently use and develop on myself.