Subject:
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Re: Can I interface the Handy board to a PC to run there the robot's brain?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.handyboard
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Date:
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Wed, 8 Mar 2000 17:57:03 GMT
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Original-From:
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Curt Mills, WE7U <hacker@tc.fluke.STOPSPAMMERScom>
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Viewed:
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856 times
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On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Gary Livick wrote:
> What in the world are you doing that you cannot get your program on the Handy
> Board? I am running a grid-based navigation routine using a 20 x 40 grid,
> driving two motors, two servos and two wheel encoders, and doing obstacle
> detection and position updating with an IR ranging sensor. I run IC, which takes
> up half of the 32K of external RAM, but even with all this I have several
> thousand bytes of RAM left over. I have never succeeded in using it all, but I'm
> sure it can be done. I'm just wondering how you did it.
>
> If you can't get your program into RAM using IC, then you can switch to a
> commercial C compiler such as ICC11 from Imagecraft, and get the 16K taking up by
> the Pcode interpreter back for your own use.
There are many applications where Interactive C won't work, some involving
lack of memory, and some involving speed of execution. I ended up needing
to switch compilers for both reasons, but mostly because of the speed. I
do a lot of processing of data coming in on the serial input, and needed the
speed to do it.
As an alternative to the commercial stuff, there are gcc-2.8.1 and gcc-2.95.x
patches that'll give you a nice free compiler with all the fixin's, but I'll
warn you that it's much more complex to do anything with than Interactive C.
Once you get your first program up and running under GCC though, following
programs are quite easy to get compiled.
Using GCC, I have full control over the entire 32k of RAM, and even the 256
or 512 bytes in the processor itself. There's a library also written for
the Handyboard (thanks to everyone who contributed code for those!) which
makes it a lot easier, but it sure isn't as simple as Interactive C to get
up and running.
Just thought it was time I let people know about this option again. I
haven't mentioned it on the list for a while.
GCC-HC11 patches and Handyboard GCC Library
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
Note: Stephane's port to gcc-2.95 appears to be much better and more
complete than what I did, so lean towards his version. He also uses the
complete GNU toolchain, whereas I didn't.
Curt Mills, WE7U hacker.NO_*SPAM@tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
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