So apparently the Pinecil is a BLE-enabled soldering iron with a 108 MHz RISC-V processor running a custom real-time operating system [0]. The author wanted to access the UART logs, so they repurposed a Raspberry Pi Pico (a dual-core microcontroller system running a real-time OS) for the task.
That's a staggering amount of hardware, sortware and computing power devoted to decoding one of the simplest and oldest serial protocols from a device whose sole purpose is to essentially melt tin. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I think I'll stick to my thermostat-controlled Weller soldering station and FTDI UART converters. I apologize if this post comes across as snarky, my point is that these are solved problems and have been for half a century.
That's a staggering amount of hardware, sortware and computing power devoted to decoding one of the simplest and oldest serial protocols from a device whose sole purpose is to essentially melt tin. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I think I'll stick to my thermostat-controlled Weller soldering station and FTDI UART converters. I apologize if this post comes across as snarky, my point is that these are solved problems and have been for half a century.
[0] https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS