AVRSH: What a tool! I mean that in a good way.

It should be no surprise that, thanks to the Auduino platform, I reach for an AVR microcontroller first…at least for any project where an ARM SoC isn’t what I’m after. Part of the success of both the AVR and the Arduino platform (which is based on the AVR) is the proliferation of tools. When you’re working on a microcontroller, you’re flying with one propellor and not much else. In fact, in any good embedded development shop, you’ll find at least one tools specialist whose full time (or nearly full-time job) is to cobble together the toolkit for the other engineers. This person’s bread and butter is keeping everyone else from flying blind.

Suffice it to say, I love a good tool, and this could be one of the best I’ve seen in a long time…AVRSH, a command line and shell that directly exposes the features of an AVR. Register manipulation, pin configs, fuses…it’s all in there, and you can interact with them using a very familiar interactive shell. This is useful for two major reasons. The first is for those times when you need to poke around and scope out how a chip feature really works. Traditionally, I attack this by making a “dummy load” program and either single-stepping through it with debugger or watching the fireworks through JTAG. If neither are available, I make the program have some long timing in it and I start attaching an oscope or LEDs to watch the state of lines. This works, but it’s a crude process that’s infinitely improved by letting me more freely interact with the chip’s features myself.

The other way AVRSH is awesome is in general proptyping of a concept. Because the only way to know if your program works is to build it, program your board with it, and watch the results, there’s an endless treadmill involved in early prototyping. An interactive shell greatly improves this scenario, especially if you’re engaged in HW/SW co-design and need to watch how changes at one level impact another.

This is, effectively, the difference between exploring a cave by throwing wireless cameras in random directions and watching the video produced…and exploring a cave by picking up a flashlight and going for a stroll.

Make this a great scripting environment and basic embedded systems programming just became a first-class part of the Linux apps programming world. With AVRs making such great controllers for robotic activities, how long before “Begone or I’ll replace you with 10 lines of Perl” really becomes true?

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September 17, 2009 · Filed under arduino, avr, toolchain

A Merry Christmas Indeed

My wife, the ever-wonderful Amy Hale, gave me a wonderful Christmas gift. I now have an Arduino Duemilanove, an XPort shield kit, and a LED art kit. Of course, the first thing I’ve considered is doing some web data-driven light art, so I just need to figure out what data I want to capture and visualize. That’s the beauty of Arduino systems…everything is simple, componentized, and ready to use. The high level language used to program the platform, Processing, really leaves you asking questions about the application of the platform instead of the implementation. I don’t believe it’s the best way in the world to learn about the design of an embedded system, but for getting something done, it’s a system which is hard to beat.

A note to prospective gift buyers, though. The XPort shield kit is just the platform for an Ethernet module but it is not an Ethernet module on its own. The supplier may be offering the module as part of an extended kit, but the build instructions at Make suggest buying an XPort which will cost an additional $30 or so (after shipping, etc). So, just remember this if you want to make the gift all-inclusive.

The other great thing is that now I have an Arduino, which I was actually planning on using to make a touch-screen prototype at work. Again, the focus on componentization and a high-level programming environment makes this a good platform for quick prototyping. When you can buy a TouchShield, drop it on the shield connector, and grab an extra Processing library and start looking at your prototype application…well, that’s a rapid prototyping dream.

I’ve been doing more part sourcing research on my completely made-from-scratch platform. I’ll post about that separately.

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December 27, 2008 · Filed under arduino

Looking ahead — Arduino vs Going It Alone

While I do have some exercises left to do before I give my final review of the XGameStation Game Console Design Starter Kit, I’m also trying to look ahead to a future project. There are a few reasons for this. The first is the obvious one– it’s because I can. Another reason, however, is because the XGS was mostly a process of getting my feet wet in prototyping, working with circuits, etc. It’s important in a self-education process to first get the feeling that you’re not going to blow it big time. Lacking a classroom environment, I basically picked something that would give me a structured process to learning how to read data sheets, work with circuits, program a microcontroller, etc. Now that I feel more comfortable, I think I can start taking on projects that are a little more complex and a little more interesting.

There’s also the other factor that the XGS isn’t the easiest platform to program for. Not only is it necessary to hand-count clock cycles to ensure you keep generating the NTSC signal correctly, but the SX has a memory architecture I find cringe-inducing. The limitations on calls, the paging system…it makes the entire process more arcane than I think it needs to be. Adding to this is the difficulty of producing color, which requires careful timing to get any given color. The XGS Pico lacks the color helper hardware of the XGS Micro.

So, I’m looking ahead to the next fish to fry. I guess I’m a product of my past in mobile devices, but I am fairly interested in something with a nice little LCD or OLED display. I’d like an SD card interface, too. USB would be handy. For UI, maybe a touch screen and a few buttons. Just a nice “screwing around” platform.

What’s interesting is that I have a few options for part sourcing on this. The first and most obvious is to purchase an Arduino and the associated TouchShield. This gets me off the ground in virtually no time and it also gives me a chance to play around with a very popular hardware platform. The Processing language is also an interesting way to work in an high-level language when you’re coding for a microcontroller. The downside, however, is that I’m not sure I’ll be learning all that much. It seems like everything is pretty much done for me at that point, from the bootloader to the parts sourcing for the display shield.

At the other end, there is the choice of completely rolling my own from scratch. This would mean selecting a microcontroller that I like (most importantly, something with in-system programming, sufficient I/O pins, and an instruction set I like), getting its programmer circuit set up, plopping down some USB and SD card support, and bringing on a touch screen part. I’m fairly okay with the idea of doing that, but I get the feeling that going this route is going to incur too much of a learning curve issue. Many of the desired parts are only available as SMT, and I don’t have tools or experience for that (yet). On top of that, I’d probably need a TON of breakout boards to get this mocked up on a breadboard, because I don’t know what other prototyping tools I’d have at my disposal. Not impossible, yes, but if I wander around in the woods too much then this blog will get very boring very quickly.

The middle-of-the-road idea is to get a prototyping board like this one from SparkFun. This has a lot of advantages. It goes ahead and takes care of a number of SMT and PCB creation concerns I have at the moment, gives me a nice through-hole prototyping area from which to work, and by the time I get things working with it, I’d probably be in a better position about rolling my own about SMT parts and my own PCB designs. At least, that’s a hope. Of course, I’d have more fun writing my own boot code, but hey…the eval boards here at work all come with sample bootloaders!

But, I still want to have an Arduino laying around, so why not do both? I can get things humming along by sketching it out with an Arduino platform, then apply what I’ve learned in designs of my own? It seems as feasible an idea as any, and with so many quick and easy things available for the Arduino platform, why not?