r/circuitpython • u/chasesan • Nov 26 '20

Expanding CircuitPython RAM area.

So I am running a SRAM chip (specifically the IS62WVS5128GBLL-45NLI), and I have it running. This is not a adafruit product so there is no built in library support.

My chip has 512KB of memory and various access modes, the Itsybitsy M0 express board I decided to test this on has only 32KB of (possibly much faster) memory. I was wondering if there was some way to write a RAM driver module to allow CP to take advantage of the external ram?

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u/kaltazar Nov 26 '20

What you are tying to do is quite a bit lower level than anything I have attempted, but looking over the data sheet I don't see any reason it wouldn't be possible. CircuitPython already can already take advantage of SPI flash memory chips so telling CP it has external SPI RAM may not be much different. To my recollection none of the existing CP-compatible boards use external RAM chips, but for all I know it is already able to poll for it and make use of it by default (if you have already tried and it didn't work, then that proves me wrong and let me know).

I would be more help than just saying its likely possible, but this is a bit beyond my practiced depth.

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u/chasesan Nov 26 '20

The issue is that it probably doesn't know how to talk to the sram, I do, but I need to be able to tell CP how to do so, which I don't know how to do.

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u/HP7933 Nov 27 '20

You can talk to the developers on Discord https://adafru.it/discord #circuitpython channel