Raspberry Pi Build Hat support

[fc3sunfire]

From what I can gather and read, the Raspberry Pi itself seems supported with the use of the Chromium browser, but are you gents looking at maybe natively on the Raspberry Pi and use the Build Hat as like a hub of its own?

I am a bit of a coder myself, so I am checking out how to contribute and would love to work with you guys to get this up and running.

[dlech]

From what I understand, the main problem is that the firmware for the Build Hat has to be signed and we don't have the signing key (related code).

There was also some related discussion in RaspberryPiFoundation/python-build-hat#135.

So for now, we can't do anything until the RPi foundation changes their minds about allowing 3rd party firmware. They have made the comment in the past that they are potentially open to the idea if there is enough demand, so keep asking them if this is something you really want.

[fc3sunfire]

Also, had a couple things, one: https://snapcraft.io/install/micropython/raspbian
is a MicroPython on Raspberry Pi, can we use this to port over the PyBricks

Also I was thinking, do we need to have PyBricks replace the firmware? I say this because of all the capabilities of the Pi. I am sure there is a performance drag, but can we do something on top of the OS? I just found this website I posted above, so going to see what possibilities this may open or not.

[laurensvalk]

Theoretically, you could indeed just make a wrapper API that makes it look like Pybricks and make it call the respective Build Hat command underneath. But it wouldn't work well because you'd keep all the slow performance of the build hat . You would also not have features like stall detection, see RaspberryPiFoundation/python-build-hat#135.

When it comes to replacing the firmware on the hat, we wouldn't necessarily put pybricks-micropython on it (although you could). Instead, we could put the pybricks-pbio components in. That's all the drivers we wrote for the LEGO devices, so without MicroPython. A hybrid of those approaches could work too.