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The mips-malta board is a maintainance burden, has no working UART input
and is unobtainable and thus must be removed.
1. Unobtainable board
=====================
The mips-malta board is not an off-the-shelf part. A quick web
search only show the MIPS website where one is told to "contact sales".
I could find it on ebay, used, at €155 and from single seller.
Not having access to the board means:
a. We cannot maintain it. In fact it could be broken right now.
b. Potential RIOT uses have not access to the board either. In other
words, it is pointless to run on hardware nobody has.
2. No working UART input
========================
Not all applications need UART input, but that is no excuse for not supporting
it:
a. Makes development & debugging way harder.
b. It is impossible to run interactive tests.
b.1. Constrains the rest of the platforms by providing an incentive to not
make tests interactive.
c. The lack of UART is a witness to the poor quality of the port.
I want to stress point (c). If something as basic as a serial port cannot work,
how can we expect more complex fucntionality to work. The answer is impossible
to know, because of point (1).
3. Maintainance burden
======================
The RIOT project has limited time and human resources which can be better spent.
a. Compiling for mips-malta wastes CPU time.
b. Blacklisting the board in the test wastes contributor's time.
c. Adapting the board's makefile during build system rework takes time and makes
the reworks harder.
c.1. Add to that that the changes are most of the time not even tested on the board
because of (1). Look at the github issues/PRs and you will see it.
d. Developers usually stick to the lowest common denominator. Issue (2) sets this
denominator unacceptably low.
MIPS platform in general
========================
In commits I will address general issues in the MIPS platform and why it should all
be removed.
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About
This application is intended for testing Feetech TTL bus. It is especially designed to test Feetech SCS15 servomotors.
Usage
To have the list of available commands :
help
You will need to initialize one UART at 1000000 baudrate (if the servomotor is in factory configuration) :
init 1 1000000
To ping the servomotor :
ping 1
Be careful ! If 2 servomotors with the same ID are connected on the same bus, you will have no response. Factory configuration ID is 1, you need to change this to connect an other servo.
To scan every connected servomotors (IDs from 0 to 253) :
scan
To read a servo register :
read 1 PRESENT_POSITION
To move a servo, you need to enable the torque and set the goal position [0-1024] :
write 1 ENABLE_TORQUE 1
write 1 GOAL_POSITION 512