Fez's are Cool!

I seem to have suddenly embraced the Arduino devices in a big way! This is the 3rd of 4 different Arduino processors that I have. The others being the original AVR8, a PIC32 and a CortexM3 in a STM32 jacket. Other strangeness that I am throwing into the mix is a plethora of weird shields, some different interpreters (Lua, FORTH, Embedded Java...) and some fairly odd development enviroments...

DIL MSP430

This turned up recently! Haven't really done much MSP430 stuff for a quite a long time and when the JTAG programmer was over parallel port. My next plan is to use it in the B&O rebuild... a whole another project...

STM Firty Too

Bought a STM32 discovery board recently. Very neat and the first board that I have had a play with that uses the two wire debugging interface. It is quite neat, the second STM32 on the board is the programming interface and it cleverly uses a USB block transfer interface to control the target STM32. I have been using the demo version of the Keil compiler and I have tweeked across quite a few of my Luminary Micro C++ classes. Quite easy really as they are both Cortex M3 based. Probably need to break down a few of classes to have a Coretex intermediate class in the heirichy. The peripheral devices aren't quite as clean as the LMS ones, things like not every I/O pin can generate an interrupt and there is no hardware FIFO on the UART but there is a DMA controller that you can do that with but it is a bit fiddlier. Will keep tweeking away and see where this takes us as I would like to make a USB <=> JTAG interface for a SHARC project I am contemplating...

Moving right along...

Off we go again! Got this pretty cool board from Renesas. Has some pretty amazing features and most importantly for a couple of things that I am looking at it has Floating Point! Staying in C++ land I have started reworking the libraries from the Cortex and so far have the GPIO and UART classes going. Had a bit of fun with getting it all to go initially but a software update and it all seemed to come good. How does the precessor stack up? Well it lacks the consistancy of the Cortex as there are 5 UARTS and there are a number of variations in extra features and pin assignment within them. We sill see how the other peripherals stack up as we go... The device does need to have an external Ethernet Phyical Interface but then they did include the rather neat one from National Semiconductor that supports ieee1588 time synchronization modes. The debugging is a bit strange in that it uses a brutalized Segger ARM debugger. A rather cool feature is that it does have two USB ports! The board also has a some rather nice peripheral devices, an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, a rather interesting FLASH memory and a nice little LCD. Got to try and get this one finished...

Cortex Phase II

Well the dsPIC version never really got off the ground... The processor is really very cool but I was being pretty optimistic about what I was going to achive with such a small amount of horse power and peripheral set... So skip on 3 years and I was back at it, but this time with the latest Luminary Micro offering. This thing is really very powerful and I had worked up a nice set of C++ libraries for the Cortex M3 ARM and the Luminary peripheral set. I know that a lot of people are a bit down on C++ in an embedded setting and I think that a lot of the issues stem from the fact that most C++ guys leap off into GUI programming and the big end of town and most of the embedded guys learn C and stop there. I often find that with people. Some guys are only interested in what is enough to do the job and that will do and then there are the guys that will bore you rigid about some new incredibly arcane aspect of virtualized template inheritence that in all honesty looks like a different language. As with pretty much all aspects of life there seems to be some middle ground. Something that makes use of all the useful aspects of C++ without pulling in the kitchen sink.

Anway we ran out of time as work and life again won out... Did get some cool libraries and as per usual started down the track to writing a complete tcp/ip stack and a whole buch of other Network stuff like ARP and DHCP!

True Audio

Well I have a very experimental TrueAudio decoder in dsPic assembler that according to the simulator will run at about x4 real time at 40MIPS -- that doesn't include disk/CD I/O but it certainly leaves a fair bit of space for that to happen. On the whole I have been pretty pleased with the dsPic as a processor. If it really does fly the way it seems like it should then we should get some good results. I have also done some more work on a couple of the Codecs that I have re-written the decoder in C++. The Shorten, ALAC and WavPack ones now seem to work for the fairly trivial collection of files that I have thrown at them. It is nice to have some fairly clean implementations of the decoders and it is also nice to work in a somewhat abstract, object oriented view then flip that into the tiny embedded world.

It's Just a Jump to the Left!

Well it didn't end up flying but we are off again. I am again using the excuse of a competition to get this flying and basically the outcome is not really any different. This time we are aiming at using the Microchip dsPic33 to achive the goods. This time we are much more likely to work as we now have a proper DSP, we have a LOT more pins to do stuff and we also have a dedicated DMA engine built into the device. These were things that really stiffiled us last time. The downsides are that the compilers are less developed and the processor is a lot slower. So how is it going? Well we have started collecting togther all the bits and we have the DSP, a USB co-processor, a network interface, a simple graphics display. I am still waiting for the output codec and this time I am also looking for an optical output, this is adding some fun to it all... I am also going to make a PCB up front for this one rather than using a pre-rolled one which often causes more problems than it solves... As far as the PCB/Schematic is going we are getting there fairly quickly so I will keep you posted in the short term...