Adding drivers

If you need low-level support for hardware that isn’t available yet, you can write your own drivers, and can expose them to the Python app layer.

  • Create the folder /firmware/components/driver_<category>_<name>.
  • In this folder, create files component.mk, Kconfig, and driver_<name>.c. Kconfig allows you to add configurable switches and variables from the ./config.sh step. The driver source file exposes an initialisation function that will be called upon boot. Have a look at e.g. /firmware/components/driver_bus_i2c to see how to populate these files.
  • In /main/platform.c:platform_init(), add INIT_DRIVER(<name>) to have your driver actually initialise during boot.
  • Add your driver’s header directory to firmware/micropython/component.mk, e.g. MP_EXTRA_INC += -I$(PROJECT_PATH)/components/driver_<category>_<name>/include.
  • Add python bindings to your driver by creating components/micropython/esp32/mod<name>.c (see e.g. modi2c.c).
  • Tell micropython about your bindings by adding the following to firmware/micropython/component.mk:
ifdef CONFIG_DRIVER_<NAME>_ENABLE
SRC_C += esp32/mod<name>.c
endif
  • Add the following to components/micropython/esp32/mpconfigport.h to add the module symbols to the python environment (replace i2c with your name):
#ifdef CONFIG_DRIVER_I2C_ENABLE
extern const struct _mp_obj_module_t i2c_module;
#endif
#ifdef CONFIG_DRIVER_I2C_ENABLE
#define BUILTIN_MODULE_I2C { MP_OBJ_NEW_QSTR(MP_QSTR_i2c), (mp_obj_t)&i2c_module },
#else
#define BUILTIN_MODULE_I2C
#endif
(to the define called MICROPY_PORT_BUILTIN_MODULES, add the following line after the other drivers):
BUILTIN_MODULE_I2C \
Last modified November 10, 2024: Small changes (1e08790)