📄️ Toolchain
Getting the toolchain working for the Axsem MCU was an absolute pain. My perfectionism would not allow me to keep writing code in visual studio with broken intellisense. So i spent litteral weeks just fiddling with everything to get simple intellisense working. Secondly, a big factor was the compiler i'd be using. There are a couple of options to compile C code for 8051 base MCU's.
📄️ Bootloader
In order to quickly flash the axsem mcu with new firmware, and to rely as little as possible on the very janky flashing setup that i have. I wanted to have a serial bootloader to just use a serial connection to flash the firmware.
📄️ Flasher
In order to flash the axsem MCU using the created bootloader, i initially went overboard and created a full blown flasher application using C# and WPF. I wanted to replicate the experience of using a Teensy board, even though successfull, it as a bit overkill for the task at hand. Later on through the absolute laziness of AI i just copied over my C# logic into claude and asked it to generate a simple python script that does the same thing. This was a lot more lightweight and easier to use, so i ended up including that in the repositories of the axsem based firmware.