RV-3028 on Pico (Tachyon extension) - can't set week day
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Hi Peter,
I stumbled across this small nuisance yesterday when attached my makeshift RV-3028 RTC board to the Pico running your Tachyon extension. The time and date sets up just fine but the DAY! stubbornly refuses to set the proper week day. No matter what I try to set it to (1-7) .FDT returns Monday. I'll look to this more closely today but maybe the solution already is implemented but just not in my system (newer version of Tachyon extension maybe) ?.
The other oddity I will post later today when back home. It has to do with .FDT and .DAY.
Just had a quick look and seems that I chose to write it to the RTC on DATE! which means DAY! only writes to the buffer and depends upon a following DATE! Other than that you can make it to a 3 RTC! directly if that suits.
I will have to check it out later.
Fixed! Thank you.
And my ugly, but working, RV-3028 makeshift board. No backup capacitor or battery for now. Had some real soldering fun with it.
Last edit: Maciek 2023-01-02
Hi Peter,
Just one more question:
does your RV-3028 support code for Tachyon extension to Mecrisp provide for the tricke charge option set to ON ?
I can't seem to find the relevant part in the code and it's not working with my ugly RTC board when I installed a big enough backup capacitor in place of the pull down 10k Ohm resistor (the one that sticks out to the left of the board). The fresh from the factory setting has this set to OFF, probably to prevent users from destroying the non rechargeable backup battery most of them will probaly use instead of the supercap.
The capacitor is a ceramic one, salvaged from some server board, so I will need to double check if it's good enough for this purpose, with low leakage but it surely is not a crooked cap.
Edit: I found the line in the code. Ok, there is a few more bits to set than just the TCE. I'll play with them some more. Looks like the config is the same as for the P2D2 but there it works (makes the RTC keep the settings and time) and here it doesn't (loses both after power down). Strange but more investigative fun.
Last edit: Maciek 2023-01-05
After some fiddling with the relevant bits and further thinking I finaly understood why it didn't work at my first attempt.
The reason was trivial - I have connected the RTC board to already booted Pico so the initial config of the RV-3028 didn't happen as it gets probed and initialised on boot. After manual initialisation it worked as it should. Stupid me.
Apparently, I was too excited to play with my ugly RTC board.
I'd like to make a suggestion about the wording of the SourceForge project summary page, for Tachyon Forth. I would start a new thread, but I don't currently see a way to do that, possibly because I only recently subscribed here.
I saw mentions of Tachyon Forth extensions in the Mecrisp Forth discussions, but it hasn't been all that easy to track down anything relevant about that. It appears that there is support for the RP2040, now, but that's not mentioned on the first page people are likely to see - the Summary page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tachyon-forth/
However, I did manage to find an RP2040 section in Files, so I'll look into that:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tachyon-forth/files/RP2040/
From searching the discussions, here and on the parallax forum, I'm not able to find much that relates to it, or to the state of development, or how to use it. I assume that information existed once, and possibly still does, but there seems to be a chunk of history missing, somehow - or possibly, it's just not obvious where to look.
Hi Andy,
The Tachyon extensions to Mecrisp on the RP2040 were done as a bridge at the time I was looking at writing a Tachyon kernel for it from scratch. I played with the RP2040 for a while and I should come back to it I guess. I will dig out the board and check the files as well.
Do you have some suggestions ?
Hi Peter,
Thanks. I don't seem to be getting notifications, from Sourceforge, so I only just saw your answer. I've turned on the settings I can see, but that doesn't appear to work.
I really don't know where to start with Tachyon. The documentation just seems to talk about the parallax chips. I don't know what applies to to the RP2040, yet, and I'm really not sure what I should be reading about it.
I had assumed there were discussions that I could read to get up to speed, but I can't find any. I don't currently know what words it defines, or how to find out what they do.
I'm struggling to even understand how to install Tachyon Forth, at the moment.
For example, this part:
"In a separate linux terminal startup minicom in ANSI mode 921600bd and ^AU to get it to add a CR (Mecrisp outputs a single LF instead of CRLF)"
Is that using a USB serial connection, or an FTDI, or similar?
Also, does it have to be Minicom, on Linux, or could I do this with TeraTerm, on Windows, which I'd be more comfortable with?
The installation seems to assume knowledge that an existing Tachyon user might already have, but I'm really quite lost, without more of an explanation of what to do.
Last edit: andy2no 2024-01-13
Hi Andy, maybe I haven't been using the reply button. Read my latest post.
Sorry for the triple post. I'm still trying to get SourceForge to let me subscribe to this thread. It seems posting again, not editing, might be the only way.
Hi Andy, I guess prerequisites are a fact of life and we have to start somewhere. But that's also where we ask questions and look for feedback too.
I think I've also mentioned so many times the different terminal emulators that one can use, but I use minicom because it works properly and is a fully functional ANSI terminal emulator that can also keep up with high baud rates too. But when it comes to Windows I used to use and still use TeraTerm.
But Mecrisp on the RP2040 only uses the hardware UART, not any special USB modes, so that means a USB to serial connection of some kind. I use Silans and FTDI and CH340 style chips etc.
Tachyon on the RP2040 is not a native Forth as it relies upon Mecrisp Forth as the base. So it is necessary to go to the Mecrisp page to find out how to load this. Fortunately it is easy and involves dragging the uf2 boot image across to the USB Flash drive that mounts when the RP2040's boot button is held in on startup. There's a UF2 in the files.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tachyon-forth/files/RP2040/
Read the README in the files section too and once Mecrisp is up and running it is simply a matter of copy&paste or sending the TACHYON.FTH etc
Thanks, Peter. I'll have a go at it later, or possibly tomorrow.
I've now had emails for your last two replies, so it seems the Reply button isn't required. I needed to tick a box that wasn't obvious, when posting a reply. It seems I failed to see it the first two times, and using it when editing my second reply didn't work. It's a little different to other forums I've used.