[time-nuts] Updated Shera controller
Javier Herrero
jherrero at hvsistemas.es
Thu Jul 29 11:17:41 UTC 2010
Hello,
El 29/07/2010 07:48, Hal Murray escribió:
> I'm not familiar with windows. I think PIC and AVR come with free software
> for windows which works well with their low cost development platforms. The
> compiler may be crippled to get you to buy the real version from somebody,
> but I'm pretty sure it's good enough to get well off the ground.
>
> I'm not familiar with what's available from the vendors for ARM.
>
>
> gcc has good support for PIC, AVR, and ARM. There may be better, but it's
> well past good enough. (It runs on windows if you use cygwin.)
>
Atmel provides free of charge a nice windows tool for the AVR,
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=2725
This integrates the GCC compiler and a quite nice development
environment (it has been a while since last time I used it), and it is
not a crippled commercial tool version. There is also no need to run
cygwin to use this tool.
For the PIC I'm not aware of anything similar. I used time ago the IAR
tools, but they are both really expensive and really not so good.
Anyway, I don't like PICs
For ARM there is also windows-based GCC tools set, that can be
integrated in Eclipse environment. You can get it at
http://www.yagarto.de . I find ARM7 derivatives (AT91SAM7X or AT91SAM7S
from Atmel, but there are a lot from several manufacturers) very nice,
fast and unexpensive 32-bit microcontrollers, adequate for those
applications where an AVR could be limited, but where there is no need
to use a big embedded OS. They are also plenty of integrated peripherals.
> Or perhaps you need an OS. If you depend on a commercial OS, somebody would
> have to buy a license. Linux is free and runs on ARM. NetBSD runs on ARM.
> I'm not sure about the other BSD variants. That's 1/2 :) I expect most of
> the code we would be interested in would be low level, just collect the data
> and pass it off to a PC to do the number crunching, display, and archiving.
> As such it doesn't need an OS.
>
>
>
An embedded linux project can be very fun, but it is quite complex. If
you need the OS, you first need the bootloader (U-boot or similar), and
you must make it work with your hardware. Then the kernel, with the
drivers for your hardware (there are a lot of them in the linux
distributions, but some may require some tuning for your hardware, and
also you can be in the need to write your own drivers for those
peripherals that are currently not supported). And finaly, the user
space application(s). Lots of fun, I can guarantee it :)
Best regards,
Javier
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Javier Herrero EMAIL: jherrero at hvsistemas.com
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