Teensy support?

[SebCanet]

Hi,
I don't know if it's the right place to ask it, but is there any support for Teensy board?
I did not find any information for this kind of board.
Many thanks.

[jmchiappa]

Hello @SebCanet ,
Teensy support is provided by the board vendor. Refer to the web site : https://www.pjrc.com/teensy.

It seems that teensy doesn't follow the right 3rd party install. It hacks the arduino folder by adding teensy board directly in the arduino root folder hardware\teensy instead of using an additional url.
Consequently, arduino-cli core list will not show teensy core as it is placed in the arduino IDE root folder. By copying manually the whole hardware/teensy folder into arduino15/hardware/packages/ , you will be able to list it.

The most straightforward way is probably to ask to PJRC to provide an URL that publishes the teensy platform instead of an executable file.

You agree, it is not related to arduino-cli ;-)

[rsora]

Hi @SebCanet, @jmchiappa,

The Arduino CLI do not support Teensy at the moment, there are 2 reasons:

1. CLI side Teensy support can be done after the implementation of the "Pluggable Discovery" feature, that will enable usage of other board discovery mechanisms beside USB/Serial.
   This will also allow us to add support for features like OTA (Does OTA work in arduino-cli? #69).

2. Core side, we will interact with the Teensy creator (PJRC/PaulStoffgren), to see what is missing to finalize the support (as @jmchiappa pointed out).

Thanks for the heads up!

[SebCanet]

Hi,
many thanks for your answers, it's much clear now.
I already tried to contact guys from PJRC and ask them for inforation about their product, but still have no response yet.
That would be great, thanks a lot @rsora for adding features. I hope this can be done easily, it seems Teensy boards are used in many coutntries in workshop for kids, and as I create software for this I'll implement it as soon as it's available.

Many thanks.

[AndrewCapon]

Hi Guys,

Was there any progress on this?

Cheers

Andy

[ubidefeo]

hi @AndrewCapon
we’re working towards implementing Pluggable Discovery which is a requirement for a series of features needed by 3rd party developers.
Once that is done it’s on said developers to implement features, and we hope Teensy will jump onboard quickly :)

[AndrewCapon]

Hi @ubidefeo

Thanks very much for the info, I will keep an eye out.

Have a nice day.

Andy

[benjamin-kirkbride]

Any update?

[ubidefeo]

hi @Beefy-Swain
The path to implementing good support for Teensy in a way that both us and the PJRC team would be happy about requires a few more things to be in place, and we're actively working to make them happen.
Both Pluggable Discovery and a Pluggable Monitor are part of the infrastructure required to have Teensy working the right way and could be useful to other 3rd party platform developers to correctly implement data exchange not just via UART but through other protocols.

You can probably hack your way into supporting Teensy for your own needs but I'd wait for something that is well thought of by Paul Stoffregen in order to make sure his User Experience is preserved.
Our efforts will be in offering platform developers the tools and infrastructure they need to bring their product into Arduino, but the last part will have to eventually be made by them following the platform specification documentation which is allowing more and more developers to bring their boards inside of Arduino.

A bit more patience might be required, just know that we're not sleeping on this one :)

[gannaramu]

I have made a small workaround for teensy based boards. https://github.com/gannaramu/Teensy-Github-Action. It does not use the arduino-cli, but hope it helps someone.

[PaulStoffregen]

@ubidefeo - Is any info or specification published regarding your plans for Pluggable Monitor?

As I'm sure you're already aware, Teensyduino adds patches to the Java IDE to implement a pluggable monitor using stdio/stdout/stderr, using only very simple status messages on stderr. I seem to recall a conversation in 2019 about plans to use localhost networking and maybe RPC? Is that still your plan? If you have any sort of preliminary spec, I would really like to begin migrating Teensyduino to use that approach on the Java IDE, so I am ready to fully support arduino-cli and the Pro IDE when you add pluggable monitor.

[PaulStoffregen]

I should also mention, serial monitor performance is critically important for Teensy 4.x. Here is a simple USB Serial.print() speed test. Very easy to run this on any board, just copy into Arduino, upload, and open the serial monitor to watch the result.

https://github.com/PaulStoffregen/USB-Serial-Print-Speed-Test/blob/master/usb_serial_print_speed.ino

I ran this yesterday on Portenta. It prints just over 10000 lines/sec.

Teensy 4.0 can print ~700000 lines/sec to Linux desktop systems, and about 500000 - 600000 to Windows. Very efficient serial monitor code is needed to keep the IDE from crashing with sustained incoming data at that speed. I rewrote the serial monitor's internal data storage, and even then Java struggles to keep up with this speed.

If you are still in the process of choosing the pluggable monitor approach, I hope we can work together as it evolves.

[ubidefeo]

hi @PaulStoffregen

thank you for taking the time to reach out.
We have indeed still plans to bring in pluggable monitor, and your input would be very welcome.
Pluggable discovery has moved forward with a working PoC (we need this also for networked devices) but in order to concentrate on the Pro IDE we had to reroute some efforts.
@cmaglie is taking a well deserved xmas break and is back next week, I think the two of you can have a chat then, he'll be able to share more information on the current status.

I have recently found out that the current monitor we're using in the Pro IDE is dropping packets (which is better than crashing the host app) so that will need some serious rework.

We're more than interested in having Teensy support, as you know, and I think the work done on the CLI over the past few months has been laying the foundation to make this work, we just need a bit more time. Unfortunately we only have 2 developers on CLI, but development has been moving forward pretty steadily.

Let's reconnect in a week, I'll ask Cristian to email you.
I really want to see Teensy in the new IDE :)

[PaulStoffregen]

@ubidefeo - Do you have any Teensy boards for testing? If not, please email me directly and I will arrange to send you some. I'll pre-load that USB speed test on them so you can just plug it in and open the serial port. Even if all features are implemented, long-term the Pro IDE needs to be able to handle incoming serial data at high speed, so please let me send you some hardware you can use for performance tests.

[ubidefeo]

@paulrnash
thank you for the offer, but I think I bought every board you made except the AVR ones :D
I also sent a couple out to the team members.

If you can send us that USB speed test code (or binary we can upload with teensy_loader) we can start testing.
This won't happen before end of January for sure, we have our hands full after the holidays.

Also today I was chatting with @facchinm and he pointed me at some serial handling code that already needs patching.
The Go part is supposed to be extremely fast, but we're a bit concerned with how JS will handle the flood.
We won't know until we dig :)

I really look forward to the team being back from the holiday so we can keep hammering 🔨 🔨 🔨