Hi all
If you or anyone you know are making custom carrier boards and this proposed change impacts you, please let me know.
I would like to re-purpose the following pins in the DF17 main cube connector on future cubes.
Pin 5, from EXTERN_CS to RSV FOR FUTURE USE
Pin 11, from EXTERN_DRDY to RSV FOR FUTURE USE
Pin 51, from SPI_EXT_MOSI to RSV FOR FUTURE USE
PIN 67,from SPI_EXT_MISO to RSV FOR FUTURE USE
PIN 73,from SPI_EXT_SCK to RSV FOR FUTURE USE
I am unaware of anyone using these for SPI purposes, and it is highly recommended that they not be used for that purpose.
I am aware of one user that repurposed Pins 5 and 11 for analogue inputs, this is the current default configuration on all cubes.
for all normal users, this is not going to have any negative impact on you.
I have one carrier design where I would like access to the SPI bus, but that design is unlikely to get distributed beyond me, you, and some of the core Ardupilot devs as an R&D/science project. I have no commercially deployed hardware where the external SPI is used and I have no plans to use the external SPI bus for a product that would be shipped commercially. I have no issues with this change proceeding as written.
We can probably give them up for future use, as I suspect we will probably be looking at a different rev of boards before the pins get mapped to something (and hopefully we will have finally found a better way to get the data to the cube then just using analog pins). Obviously if we can keep using them that would be great, but I don’t think it’s worth limiting the range of cubes simply because we stole the pair of analog pins here, particularly if it obviates the need for another connector
