Microcontrollers

Intel 8051

I've got a QuickStart™ microcontroller board from Analog Devices. A special I/O-interface from Contraves AG is mounted on-top of it. The micro controller is a ADuC812 and is based on a 8052. It's 8051 compatible and has a good ADC and DAC integrated.

This is how it looks like:

To connect the board with my Mac, I use a USB to RS232 adapter. See my Serial Port page for more information.

I compile my programs with SDCC, an open source C compiler that works great on Mac OS X. SDCC stands for Small Device C Compiler and doesn't only compile code for 8051 Microcontrollers, it supports a lot of other ones as well, including PICs. You can download Mac OS X binaries from the SDCC Snapshots Page.

To download the .ihx files to the controller I wrote this small downloader. It's not written very well and isn't finished yet. It only works with the ADuC812 with at least firmware version 2 on it. But it should run on any POSIX Unix. You can download a Darwin binary from my download page. I also publish the source code, so you can compile your own binary. But if you have made some changes or just have a good idea, please mail me your code. It's written in C and compiles with GCC. You can find the code on my download page as well.

Sadly I couldn't get it to work with the serial adapters I own. I think the problem are the not fast enough control lines. I'll do more research on this when I have time. Byron Jeff has made an attempt to develop a programmer that works with USB adapters. But as far as I know it's not usable yet.

Anyway, the programmer works on a PC with a real serial port. For windows there is an app called icprog. For Linux there's picprog and pkp from the pikdev IDE. Picprog compiles fine on OS X as well. pkp compiles after removing all the code for the parallel port.

The Wisp628 is an "intelligent" programmer for the serial port. It's driven by a 16f628A that does all the work. This makes the programmer usable with pretty much any serial port including the serial adapters I own. The only thing that can be a problem is the high baud rate that xwisp2 uses. For my Keyspan PDA adapter I need to switch to a lower baud rate with "baud 19200". xwisp2 is the most up to date programming tool for the wisp628 written in C and now works with Mac OS X. Download the source and build it with "make -f xwisp2_gu.mak"

To write assembler programs for all PICs you can use the Microchip ASM compatible assembler gpasm from the gputils suite. To simulate your programs there is gpsim. You can find fink files for all these tools here. To write programs in C the only good compiler is SDCC, but the PIC port isn't finish yet. It compiles simple programs though. It works with the gputils together. To compile a program for the 16f819 type: "sdcc -mpic14 -p16f819 yourfile" in the terminal. The header files you can download at the downloads section. It's a petty that at the moment only little work is done on the PIC port. The head developer of the PIC port is primary working on gpsim. But I've heard that some people are working on the 18F port and that it's getting more an more usable.

I'm now working on getting some USB sample code for the 18f2550 running. I'm planning to use C code that compiles with sdcc. This works so far, but I haven't got anything to show yet.