Consumer electronics

[roaldarbol]

Hi there!
I just heard of Harp in a movement community call, It looks super interesting! I've got a few questions about the versatility of Harp:

• The documentation notes that it runs on Pico/Pico 2 - does it run on any Micropython enabled board, or what is the requirement?
• Lots of consumer electronics, e.g. breakout boards for environmental sensors, Neopixel arrays etc. have dedicated Micropython/CircuitPython/Arduino packages (often made available by e.g. Pimoroni, Adafruit or the like). Do any of these packages interface with Harp, or would one have to write their own packages to interface with these components?

I guess the wider question here is also: How easy would it be for a user to implement and use their own Harp device - so not the ones available in these repositories?

[glopesdev]

@roaldarbol Short answer: yes, you should absolutely be able to implement your own Harp device running on the pico/pico2 with or without micropython.

Long answer: There is both a pico SDK compatible and a micropython compatible implementation of Harp. They have different tradeoffs, learning curves and flexibility which I am happy to discuss.

The hobgoblin is built on top of the pico SDK implementation, which is currently further along and compliant with the entire standard, and being used for many applications and experiments.

Do any of these packages interface with Harp, or would one have to write their own packages to interface with these components?

This is hard to say without looking over the specifics of each component. Natively these components won't support harp, but if they provide a library for interfacing with the pico SDK then you should be able to integrate them more easily.

How easy would it be for a user to implement and use their own Harp device - so not the ones available in these repositories?

There is a pico-template which you can have look at to get a feel of how you might approach design of a new device.

The hobgoblin repository itself was built on top of these building blocks and was meant to be used as a learning example on how to make firmware for these devices.

Other than this, answering the question "how easy" would depend on how comfortable you are writing code for either the pico SDK or micropython. Nothing changes in the hardware, so if you are already comfortable, the Harp implementation layer should be easy enough to setup and get communication going with the computer and also synchronising the clock with other boards.

[roaldarbol]

I'm quite interested in the Micropython compatible implementation. Is there any good documentation for that? I don't know whether you've seen, but I'm doing quite a bit of work these days on getting easy integration of Micropython/CircuitPython through the belay Python package, so I'm quite active both on the Discord channel and the Discussion forum. But I'm quite curious about Harp for settings where precise timing is more essential than what presently is for me.

As a separate subject, I am considering starting to create a "Belay" Bonsai package that builds on top of Bonsai.Scripting.Python, similar to what Bonsai.ML does. I think if I were to begin that, I might possibly need a bit of guidance along the way, but if it could be interesting for you I'm happy to discuss that on a call. Various discussions going on:

• Belay in Bonsai BrianPugh/belay#198
• Belay paper BrianPugh/belay#202
• https://github.com/roaldarbol/Belay-Paper

The idea is not then to act as a replacement to Harp, but rather to provide a simple access for Micropython/CircuitPython boards, similar to the Arduino package.