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!