[W600-PICO] Thanks for keeping MicroPython alive for this board

[AlexYeryomin]

Hi,

I use W600-PICO for my projects, now mostly as a "Wi-Fi adapter" (see below). Probably not the best choice in comparison to devices based on ESP8266/ESP32 (I use these too), but, well, it has been working for my humble needs just fine. I write a code for it in MicroPython, and so far no problems were found with MP1.10, which was installed on the boards by default. But, recently I wanted to connect a I2C module to W600-PICO, and it didn't work at all. It looked like MP code didn't follow I2C spec at some points, which leads to troubles. After getting headache from this issue, I was about to give up, but fortunately found out that a good Samaritan uploaded an image for W600 with the latest MicroPython 1.19 a couple of days ago (https://github.com/robert-hh/Shared-Stuff)! I updated W600 and voilà it works with I2C nicely!!!

I believe, github doesn't allow sending private messages, so I decided to write here. Thank you, Robert Hammelrath (@robert-hh), for providing updates of MicroPython for W600 board! Really appreciate your efforts!

About using W600-PICO as a "Wi-Fi adapter". In fact, my main board for my latest projects is Pi Pico (RP2040). I love its PIO a lot (and 2 CPUs on boards for real multithreading, too). The only (kind of) drawback for me was that Pico didn't have Wi-Fi onboard. I just connected Pi Pico to W600+PICO via serial interface and setup W600 to translates data from/to a TCP socket. This combo works flawlessly.

Alex

[robert-hh]

I'm happy if it helps. I keep the branch in sync with MicroPython and put from time to time pre-built images to the Shared-Stuff location. In my view, the W600 is the better alternative to an ESP8266, except for the flash size. Code run like two times faster, it provides a larger heap space, has a full functional second UART and more GPIO pins. It's a pity that the 2MB variant seems not to be available anywhere. But if needed, one can as well connect an external flash chip or a SD card for larger storage.

[federicomm]

Available boards with flash size of 2Mbyte

"
https://github.com/orgs/micropython/discussions

robert-hh
on Feb 26

It's a pity that the 2MB variant seems not to be available anywhere.
"

For the two ThingsTurn TB-01 modules I bought on Oct 25, 2022 from AliExpress:

The W600-BA00 version reported on the WinnerMicro W600 microcontroller chip mounted on the two ThingsTurn TB-01 modules correspond to the 2MB flash memory size as also confirmed by the following micropython instruction :

w600.flash_size()
2097152 bytes

An indirect confirmation can be obtained by examining the enlargement of one of the photos of the board on the seller's page at the following WEB address ( the one of my order ):

https://m.vi.aliexpress.com/item/32978979389.html

The product description in the seller page that reports "8Mbit Flash" should be correct with "16Mbit Flash".

[tochinet]

Not related to the OP, but being new at uPython and trying to get the W600 board working, I'm a bit puzzled by teh lack of upload capabilities.
Just got my hands on the W600 pico, interesing because of its size for a replacement of "Panstamps" (ATmega368 + CC1101 RF) for my project, but... it looks like there is no simple way to upload files ? I'm pretty inexperienced in (micro)Python, coming from C/C++ on Arduino, so I'd like to know :

• I found the archived discussion on https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7652&start=20 but it looks like the forum is deprecated.
• I'm also grateful that @roberthh (Guten Tag) has done a port to W600, but is there any reason it's not in the list of supported boards, Is it beta ? Any risk to brick the device if I replace the factory with the new robert-hh/Shared-Stuff/blob/master/wm_w600_lfs_threading.fls file ?
• I tried to pip install the w600tool from the repo, but that won't work either,
• Is is possible to add webrepl to the W600 ? Or some OTA method ? It seems the memory is organised for OTA, but I don't see docs explaining how it works.

Sorry if these are newbie questions, I thought that board was fantastic after reading the hackster article, but now I'm less sure...

[robert-hh]

There is not much of information. I have some stuff collected in https://github.com/robert-hh/WM_SDK_W60X, and a w600 repository, which lacks the English pages, but I had some sometimes. I have attached a data sheet, which is really sparse.
w600.pdf

[rkompass]

It seems like they have given up on using the ARM architecture (for licence fees or independence??) and switched to the C-SKY architecture (which was acquired by ALIBABA in 2018). This I tend to suppose from:

Now there is the W801 chip, among others, which resembles the W601, the docs of which I started to study by mistake: https://github.com/nvv13/test/blob/main/test-mk/w801/doc/WM_800%20Register%20manual%20v2.1%20(en).pdf
only to find that the register descriptions are more detailed and they (in case of GPIO on page 107) match the definitions in
w600-sdk/tree/master/include/wm_regs.h:

#define HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR           	(HR_APB_BASE_ADDR + 0x0C00)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA                	(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x0)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA_EN             	(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x04)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA_DIR		(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x08)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA_PULLEN		(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x0c)
#define HR_GPIOA_AFSEL			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x10)
#define HR_GPIOA_AFS1			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x14)
#define HR_GPIOA_AFS0			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x18)
#define HR_GPIOA_IS			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x20)
#define HR_GPIOA_IBE			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x24)
#define HR_GPIOA_IEV			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x28)
#define HR_GPIOA_IE			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x2C)
#define HR_GPIOA_RIS			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x30)
#define HR_GPIOA_MIS			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x34)
#define HR_GPIOA_IC			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x38)

The same matches are found for PWM. I did not check other peripherals.

[robert-hh]

That is interesting. It would be more helpful if the SDK has the same/similar API entries. Then the MP port can easily be transferred.

[rkompass]

It has:

#define HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR           	(HR_APB_BASE_ADDR + 0x1200)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA                	(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x0)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA_EN      		(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x04)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA_DIR		(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x08)
#define HR_GPIOA_DATA_PULLEN		(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x0c)
#define HR_GPIOA_AFSEL			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x10)
#define HR_GPIOA_AFS1			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x14)
#define HR_GPIOA_AFS0			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x18)
#define HR_GPIOA_IS			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x20)
#define HR_GPIOA_IBE			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x24)
#define HR_GPIOA_IEV			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x28)
#define HR_GPIOA_IE			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x2C)
#define HR_GPIOA_RIS			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x30)
#define HR_GPIOA_MIS			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x34)
#define HR_GPIOA_IC			(HR_GPIOA_BASE_ADDR + 0x38)

taken from https://gitee.com/iosetting/wm-sdk-w80x/blob/master/include/wm_regs.h.

[rkompass]

I got my W600 boards today and after flashing them I found:

• I have MP version 1.19
• gc.mem_free() reports 40048 bytes
• w600.flash_size() reports 1048576
• Thonny reports 174.5K of total file system size.

@robert-hh checking against your last post in the forum
I calculate: 1024K - 384K (OTA) - 174.5K(Filesystem) = 465K. Is that the size of the actual binary?
But the firmware wm_w600_lfs.fls is 602K in size. Is the file system included in the wm_w600_lfs.fls ?
Could you give some more details to your port? Does it have TLS? Is there a way to increase RAM and/or file system size?
You have nice descriptions how to compile the binary on your site. Also there it is reported

Internal filesystem using the flash (32KB available)

I suspect that was before the OTA space was reclaimed.
A new calculation: 1024K - 602K(Firmware) = 398K.
Now 398K - 175K (file system) = 223K. Is this unused? / not usable?

Anyway I'm happy to use the w600 boards. Thank you for helping me with the above questions. Perhaps I can build the firmware myself and include some scrips as frozen files and still have the same file system size using the above unused space?

I was hoping to use microdot on these boards but am afraid now I can't. If there is not much more left from the 288K RAM than 40K given that OS and network/WIFI take their share it would be the same with a W800 with its 288 K RAM too, wouldn't it?

[robert-hh]

OTA is not used. The space was needed for the firmware. TLS is not enabled. There is a compile error since a while when trying to enable it, and it did not look into it yet. The binary size is 559234 Bytes, the filesystem size is 176k. SSL takes about 100k, once enabled. So there is some room available to increase the filesystem.

The way the RTOS consumes RAM is sad. You have the same with ESP8266 and ESP32. Compared to that, the bar bone ports like STM32, MIMXRT and SAMD use almost no RAM for static data. Most of the RAM these use is for the C stack.

[robert-hh]

your ftp server

Actually the W600 ftpserver was made by Winner. The lack of RAM can be compensated by putting code into flash. if you copy Microdot to the scripts directory or name it in manifest.py, it will be installed as frozen bytecode, not using RAM for the code.

[rkompass]

@robert-hh
Firstly: Thank you for the recent updates in the branch.

I had a success:
I managed to increase the RAM by setting .equ Heap_Size, 0x28000 in line 56 of SDK file 'Platform/Boot/gcc/startup_ARMCM3.S', considering the note

4.3 Memory Usage
W60X has 288KByte SRAM with address space 0x20000000~0x2048000. Used for system stack and transceriver BD of Wi-Fi.
Users can define the system stack size in start_venus.s (MDK KEIL) or startup_ARMCM3.s (GCC) : Heap_Size EQU 0x001A000
Current default value is 104K Bytes.
Note: The former 160KByte space can be used as task stack area. The latter 128KByte space can be used for data storage only and can not be used for task stack.

of 'WM_W60X_SDK_User%20Manual_V1.0.0.pdf'

Now gc.mem_free() reports 85K instead of 52K free memory.

Next I want to test whether there is still more unused RAM. I suppose the RAM area above 0x20028000 is not used at all.
Assuming the micropython compiler/interpreter is one task among others in the 160K wide task stack would explain why there is so few RAM (of 288K) left.
Unfortunately I observe that neither machine.mem32 nor micropython.native nor micropython.viper decorators are available.
Which compilation options are responsible for that?

[robert-hh]

Python does not execute code from the heap. That would allow using the upper 128k for the heap. The hep is set in main.c, so you can try it, or just print the address in main.c using mp_printf(MP_PYTHON_PRINTER, format, args ...)

[rkompass]

Before that step I wanted to check via mem32[] or viper pointers whether the upper 128K are used or not.
But I cannot yet as these are not available atm.

[rkompass]

I uncommented the 3 printf s

    printf("Stack Base = %p, SP = %p\n", mpy_task_stk, sp);
    printf("Avail_Heap_Size = %u\r\n", tls_mem_get_avail_heapsize());
    // Allocate the uPy heap using malloc and get the largest available region
#if MICROPY_SSL_MBEDTLS
    u32 mp_task_heap_size = (tls_mem_get_avail_heapsize() * 4) / 10; // 40%
#else
    u32 mp_task_heap_size = (tls_mem_get_avail_heapsize() * 6) / 10; // 60%
#endif
    void *mp_task_heap = tls_mem_alloc(mp_task_heap_size);

    printf("Heap_Address = %p, heap_size = %u\n", mp_task_heap, mp_task_heap_size);

in main.c's mpy_task() and get:

Stack Base = 0x20002d34, SP = 0x20006b80
Avail_Heap_Size = 150096
Heap_Address = 0x2001a088, heap_size = 90057

[robert-hh]

Just add these three lines to the machine_module_globals_table at the end of modules/modmachine.c and recompile.

    { MP_ROM_QSTR(MP_QSTR_mem8), MP_ROM_PTR(&machine_mem8_obj) },
    { MP_ROM_QSTR(MP_QSTR_mem16), MP_ROM_PTR(&machine_mem16_obj) },
    { MP_ROM_QSTR(MP_QSTR_mem32), MP_ROM_PTR(&machine_mem32_obj) },

Edit: I just updated the port.

[rkompass]

Thx. And there is no contradiction if I enable both EMIT_THUMB and EMIT_THUMB_ARMV7M ?

[robert-hh]

I do not know. Just try it.

[jimmo]

See https://github.com/orgs/micropython/discussions/11630#discussioncomment-6010701

[rkompass]

We can run @native, @viper and @asm_thumb now.

[rkompass]

@robert-hh I will continue discussion as issue on your github repo.

[lumodino]

Hi,

I use W600-PICO for my projects, now mostly as a "Wi-Fi adapter" (see below). Probably not the best choice in comparison to devices based on ESP8266/ESP32 (I use these too), but, well, it has been working for my humble needs just fine. I write a code for it in MicroPython, and so far no problems were found with MP1.10, which was installed on the boards by default. But, recently I wanted to connect a I2C module to W600-PICO, and it didn't work at all. It looked like MP code didn't follow I2C spec at some points, which leads to troubles. After getting headache from this issue, I was about to give up, but fortunately found out that a good Samaritan uploaded an image for W600 with the latest MicroPython 1.19 a couple of days ago (https://github.com/robert-hh/Shared-Stuff)! I updated W600 and voilà it works with I2C nicely!!!

I believe, github doesn't allow sending private messages, so I decided to write here. Thank you, Robert Hammelrath (@robert-hh), for providing updates of MicroPython for W600 board! Really appreciate your efforts!

About using W600-PICO as a "Wi-Fi adapter". In fact, my main board for my latest projects is Pi Pico (RP2040). I love its PIO a lot (and 2 CPUs on boards for real multithreading, too). The only (kind of) drawback for me was that Pico didn't have Wi-Fi onboard. I just connected Pi Pico to W600+PICO via serial interface and setup W600 to translates data from/to a TCP socket. This combo works flawlessly.

Alex

Hi.

How can I update the firmware without an img file? Where can I obtain a img file instead of a fls. Using w600tool can't upload the fls file.

Thanks.

[robert-hh]

img files are not supported. The firmware grew beyond the size that keeps space in flash for the img download buffer. You should be able to download .fls files with wm-tool.exe. I do that all the time, albeit with the Linux version. You have to push the reset button of the board when the message wait serial sync.... comes up. The command line should be:
wm_tool.exe -c COMx -eo secboot -dl wm_w600.fls

For COMx you have to select your COM port, like COM4.

[lumodino]

Thank you for your fast answer.

I was using w600tool. Finally, before reading your reply I have found a solution for w600tool error about secboot. Connecting PA0 to GND and execute w600tool. The firmware was uploaded.

Thank you for your job. I thought that this microcontroller never will be updated with a more updated version of micropython.

[robert-hh]

You're welcome. I just upgraded the files in the SharedStuff repository. Since April they are at v1.20.

[shirogeek]

Hi @robert-hh,

I also came here mainly to say thanks !
I realized the SDK would take time to adapt to and the Arduino core is in shambles so micropython it is. Just a quick question, is there any chance the SDIO is ever implemented within the micropython port ?

Thanks a lot !

[robert-hh]

Thank you for your notes. I do not know of any SDIO implementation for MicroPython. Since it's possible to implement in based on SPI, it should be be feasible tom support SDIO as Python code. Just like the SD card driver or MicroPython https://github.com/micropython/micropython-lib/tree/master/micropython/drivers/storage/sdcard.