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Old 30th Nov 2022, 9:45 pm   #56
SiriusHardware
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK.
Posts: 11,482
Default Re: Tesla Programmer

For the question of whether it would be feasible to serially receive 512 items of data as Intel Hex at high speed on an Arduino Uno, the answer would seem to be maybe.

I've just put a 512 byte binary file through a binary to Intel Hex conversion and the resulting Intel Hex file came out at 1,387 characters. According to various sources the UNO has 2K of RAM but of course that is shared out amongst everything on the Uno that wants some RAM such as run time variables, arrays, etc.

It does seem that it might be possible to download the whole Intel Hex file into RAM at high speed and then shift it out at whatever slower speed the programming process imposes.

If it was possible to convert the Intel Hex back to raw data during the serial load process rather than afterwards, then the buffered raw data would take up considerably less internal RAM, especially if it was 'packed' as two PROM data nibbles in every byte of Arduino RAM although I think that last step would be an unnecessary complication. Not packing the data would allow for the possibility of byte-wide data to be loaded, at which point you could let the user choose to program the PROM with bits 0-3 of the data or bits 4-7 of the data.
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