So, after an embarrassingly long delay I’ve finally pushed myself to complete my Bistro port. The code, binaries and installation instructions are available on the Github page. I’ve also opened a new discussion thread for this firmware.
All the features seem to work, but overall I believe that porting Bistro is a dead-end:
- A big part of Bistro’s appeal is medium press functionality. But none of the Convoy drivers have the off-time capacitor big enough to distinguish between medium and long press. Soldering an additional capacitor to the 8x7135 driver is already annoying enough, and doing the same for 5A dual-fuel driver is going to be too hard, as all the components there are tiny. It is, of course, possible to compile and use Bistro without medium press support, but you lose quite a lot of functions: turbo shortcut, battery check, blinkies. And the code to support these becomes a dead weight.
- I’m not a big fan of the fade-in soft start feature, and the firmware would be easier to port and calibrate without it.
- Bistro code seems to be optimized for tiny flash size of ATtiny25. But Sonix microcontrollers have more flash, so the code can have more abstractions to simplify porting instead.
I’ll probably make another firmware later – maybe something close to stock Biscotti UI from Convoy, but with more settings and better thermal throttling. But for now, I plan to work on reverse-engineering the 5A dual-fuel driver.