[Feature Request] Driver for PIC32MX

[omarandlorraine]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I could use a driver for the PIC32MX. This chip has an ethernet thingy on-chip, but no driver in FreeRTOS Plus TCP.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like the driver to be added! I'm happy to do the bulk of the work here. But I am probably going to need some guidance. What shall I do, open a pull-request?

Describe alternatives you've considered
I've considered other TCP/IP stacks. I've considered lwip, and I like the idea of having a zero-copy stack. I don't know whether that's something we can accomplish here.

Microchip (the vendor of PIC32 and related products) do a TCP/IP stack as well, but it's buggy, and its version 5.10 won't even compile without some work. This is why I am porting my application from that to FreeRTOS Plus TCP.

Additional context
There already is a pic32mz driver. It seems to call some of the Microchip libraries to do things like getting the MAC address, and probably initiating DMA transfers and whatnot. My plan is to take a similar approach.

There is also this project which for licensing reasons is not compatible with my application.

[paulbartell]

@omarandlorraine Thanks for the feature request. We're happy to review any contributions in the form of a Pull Request. Is there a particular development board you plan to target?

[omarandlorraine]

@omarandlorraine Thanks for the feature request. We're happy to review any contributions in the form of a Pull Request

Great! Hopefully I'll make a start tomorrow.

Is there a particular development board you plan to target?

I have a product that's similar to this Dev board. I'd need to make sure it's the same PHY though (and I think I know roughly what that means).

[AniruddhaKanhere]

@omarandlorraine, if you haven't started already, this page is quite helpful in defining what needs to be done to get a simple FreeRTOS+TCP driver working with the stack.

[omarandlorraine]

Does anyone know why the buffer allocation source file for the pic32mzef port #includes tcpip/tcpip.h here?

As far as I can tell, this header file comes from lwIP. Does FreeRTOS Plus TCP depend on or build upon lwIP?

[AniruddhaKanhere]

As far as I can tell, this header file comes from lwIP. Does FreeRTOS Plus TCP depend on or build upon lwIP?

I think that this seems to be an lwIP file too. But, I don't believe that +TCP depends on lwIP at all. This file predates my interactions with +TCP. I will ask my colleagues and get back to you on this.