New ESP32 Port

[dylanetaft]

I am looking at porting the Maslow 4 board to grblhal. The ESP32 driver is using a very old SDK that has been deprecated.
I am building on the ESP SDK 5.4.1. They changed a ton of API, timers, i2c, so I am building a new driver.

I saw another thread about documenting the process, I probably could do that.

The Maslow 4 is weird. It has 4 planetary gear brushed motors instead of steppers, for inverse kinematic based movement via trilateration, ADC for current sensing on each motor, AS5600 magnetic encoders, TCA9546A I2C switch.

I am going to try to make the motors emulate step pulses against the magnetic encoders.

I ported the drivers from Sparkfun and a popular arduino library here and introduced a HAL layer for I2C.
https://github.com/dylanetaft/I2C_HAL_drivers

I don't see a very strong I2C interface\HAL layer in grblhal, am I missing anything?

Is it best to just use grbl core, implement the necessary code to drive peripherals in a board driver for grblhal, and keep other things separate from grblhal - like there's not a standard interface for uart, i2c, spi callbacks or externs to define in a board driver?

I see maybe a couple things in core/plugins.h...
extern i2c_cap_t i2c_start (void);
extern bool i2c_probe (i2c_address_t i2c_address);
extern bool i2c_send (i2c_address_t i2c_address, uint8_t *data, size_t size, bool block);
extern bool i2c_receive (i2c_address_t i2cAddr, uint8_t *buf, size_t size, bool block);
extern bool i2c_get_keycode (i2c_address_t i2c_address, keycode_callback_ptr callback);
extern bool i2c_transfer (i2c_transfer_t *i2c, bool read);

The keycode thing looks strangely specific to a specific plugin.

But it's missing things - like often times you write to a reg and then read without an i2c stop bit.

Should I just ignore "plugins" and stick with implementing core? Kinda thinking yes.

I was wondering if there's anything to contribute back to grblhal for the project I'm working on - maybe not, just use the core - really only the bits you need even then - build your own cmake file.