Port protection for Rev7

[lersi]

I am not an hardware engineer, so I do not understand what are the major changes of BP7, what SOC does it going to have and does it going to have an FPGA?

For me, personally the frequency of new major reversions is a bit too fast, we had the BP3 for a decade and now we have new BP every six months. It will also make it harder to maintain all the different versions in a single repo.

[ian]

@ian

So first of all, this isn’t anywhere close to release. It’s just a group discussion that creates prototypes as a byproduct. The first routed board was completed in October or November but there were no RP2350B to buy, and I wasn’t going to buy a full reel of broken silicon under the prerelease program for prototyping if there was a chance they might have a stepping.

There’s a couple threads discussing what people are interested in. I couldn’t find the main one earlier, so posted where you saw it.

We have a current completed PCB prototype with

This thread may help. We are just trying different things out. The PICO SDK makes it easy to support all the platforms, and we are looking at an integrated universal firmware for the RP2350 chips with one time programmable memory.

5 is still the current gold standard. I did the Raspberry PI prerelease program and made some boards for fun with the new chips, we are only now starting to formulate those into a new version as a community.

[electronic_eel]

@lersi

what SOC does it going to have and does it going to have an FPGA?

It just has a microcontroller, no FPGA. The microcontroller is the RasPi RP2350.

@lersi

For me, personally the frequency of new major reversions is a bit too fast, we had the BP3 for a decade and now we have new BP every six months. It will also make it harder to maintain all the different versions in a single repo.

The BusPirate 7 (and the planned 8) is currently just low-volume development. You can sometimes buy some as non-developer too, but it is not unlikely that there are bugs and rough edges present, the firmware is not finished and so on.

@ian you mentioned reconsidering the numbering scheme and introducing tiers or some such that each have their revision numbers. Maybe then also consider explicit naming of development versions as such.

[henrygab]

I also think it’d made sense to move away from the BP7 / BP8 naming for those boards. They are prototypes in all but name right now.

Maybe something closer to “Prototype N”, where the N is unrelated to the BP5 / BP6 numbering? Such a name should avoid any confusion about the intended long-term viability of those boards, also.