Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov has introduced a brand new characteristic for the corporate’s speedy RT1010Py MicroPython improvement board: a port of the TinyUF2 bootloader for drag-and-drop firmware flashing.
“Robert Hammelrath did superb job by including [a] usbtinyuf2 bootloader to it, so now you possibly can exchange the MicroPython firmware by easy drag and drop such as you do on [Raspberry Pi] Pico,” Usunov explains of the board’s new characteristic. “We are going to ship all RT1010Py any more with usbtinyuf2 bootloader.”
Olimex’s Tsvetan Usunov has introduced a TinyUF2 port for the RT1010Py MicroPython board, for straightforward drag-and-drop firmware set up. (📷: Olimex/MicroPython)
The corporate launched the RT1010Py again in November 2023, as what Usunov referred to as its “quickest board working MicroPython” — due to the NXP Semiconductors MIMXRT1011DAE5A “crossover” microcontroller at its coronary heart. The chip’s 500MHz Arm Cortex-M7 core offers, Usunov says, round 4 occasions the efficiency of the Raspberry Pi RP2040 on an earlier Olimex MicroPython board design, whereas an optionally available “devkit” provider board added USB Sort-C energy, two UEXT connectors, and two mains-voltage relays to the breadboard-friendly improvement board’s capabilities.
The brand new bootloader does nothing to spice up the efficiency nonetheless additional, however does make it so it is simpler to load new firmware onto the board. Simply double-click the on-board RESET button and the microcontroller will load UF2 mode — showing to the host working system to be a surprisingly low-capacity USB Mass Storage Gadget. Drag and drop any suitable UF2-format firmware to this drive, and it’ll all of the sudden disappear because the board flashes the firmware and hundreds it on reboot.
Directions on flashing and utilizing the brand new bootloader can be found on the MicroPython web site, whereas boards with the bootloader pre-loaded can be found from the Olimex retailer priced at €15 (round $16.50) every; the board design recordsdata can be found on GitHub underneath the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
