file upload or Internet fetch of firmware image for unsupported boards

[Kathy Giori]

Unpopular or end-of-life boards don’t need their firmware images bundled with the IDE. However, it isn’t easy for learners to update an unsupported board if they were given one with it pre-flashed. If they update the IDE, at some point the IDE will display a message that their board has an old VM image.

Would it be possible to upload/attach the updated VM image and have the IDE flash it to the board? For example, for the IoT-Bus IO board, its VM is not identical to a generic ESP32. Could a user obtain the latest VM and upload it to the IDE so it can flash the connected board? An alternative to manual VM image upload might be to fetch it automatically (over the Internet) from Bitbucket (from a directory of the latest VMs supported by the platformio.ini file). Or support both methods.

[John Maloney]

Do you have a particular board and audience in mind?

I think most of the folks who might want to use unsupported boards, especially ESP boards, won’t mind using the fairly easy (for a tech savvy person) process of building and installing the firmware from source using either Arduino IDE or Platformio, which is documented in the README file for this repository.

There are a few special cases, such as the ItsyBitsy, which is used in the SnowPixel project in elementary schools. For those cases, we distribute a precompiled .uf2 or .hex file in the release VM folder that people can install by dragging it to USB flash drive for their board.

Educators: if would like to use an unsupported board, please email us at [e-mail] to discuss.