Writing an Arduino driver with OpenAI ChatGPT and PDF parsing – Adafruit Blog
New video! One of the big tasks that Ladyada still has to spend a lot of time on is writing Arduino libraries for all our devices and sensors, particularly all the I2C & SPI chips out there! These ICs use register maps and sub-byte addressing to set dozens of configurable knobs and switches, and a good driver lets folks set and get all of the noodly bits.
However, there is yet to be a standard format to get that configuration map. Instead, you have to pore over datasheets with long lists of binary tables and bit insets to figure out how to convert that into C or Python code.
It is tough. Only a few folks can write an excellent comprehensive library…. but Ladyada can & has! In fact, there are hundreds of Arduino libraries on Adafruit’s GitHub https://github.com/orgs/adafruit/repositories, all in the Ladyada ‘style,’ using Adafruit_BusIO for I2C / SPI register addressing https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_BusIO/ and since ChatGPT 4 was trained on all of it, we can ask it to become a mini-Ladyada to write new drivers.
With a PDF parsing plugin, we can even upload the chip’s datasheet to extract register names, values, create enum tables, and text for doxygen comments. Here’s the chatGPT log for the video https://chat.openai.com/c/f740eb57-17a6-41e3-ae0a-12da959a1f4c – and here’s a previous one that is more ‘complete’ https://chat.openai.com/share/f44dc335-7555-4758-b2f9-487f9409d556. The amount of time it takes for ChatGPT to write a driver is about the same as it would take Ladyada, and you definitely need to be eagle-eyed to redirect the AI if it starts making mistakes… but it can be done even when Ladyada is tired after a full day of baby-care, or at the same time as pumping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpbH-sXRNps – plus there’s a lot less continuous typing/mousing so her wrists don’t ache the next day!
Do you use ChatGPT for electrical engineering or coding work? Any suggestions on how to make this even better? This is only our 3rd day using this tool, so we’re getting started with how to integrate it into our workflow.
In an upcoming post we’ll outline how we’re credit ChatGPT when we’re using it in this somewhat “pair programing” way, and who we’re asking out there for guidance on how license can/will reflect these collaborations.
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