8 - MR18 Deep Dive: Talking to Hardware
The boring infrastructure that makes everything else possible
I got my mind on my money and my money on my mind
Every previous post in this series focused on the dramatic stuff—cache coherency nightmares, hand-encoded MIPS assembly, twenty-minute UART transfers. But none of that works without the plumbing. The mr18_flash.py script has about 300 lines of infrastructure code that handles three things: talking to a bench power supply, talking to OpenOCD over telnet, and managing the OpenOCD process itself. It’s not glamorous. It’s the kind of code you write at 1am because you’re tired of manually typing commands into four different terminals. Let’s walk through it.