Rest of the story......

Well lemme tell you about the rest of the story......

The next day i happened to go there with many of my classmates...Many were really bugged up by the technology there but let me tell you one thing....its a place on earth where every embedded system designer would wish to be.....
Let me get into the concepts part rather than the boring story........
Again i am going to divide this into say 3 units to be precise. Each one is gonna give you, the readers i mean, a brief outlook of Microchip's payed classes which was charged at 10$ per class...Be happy that you are getting it for free.I mean you all are making a profit of 30$ and also the pleasure of sitting back rocking your chair where ever you are just by this blog.....wish i had someone who could do the same.....

The first part is about Microchip's enhanced PIC 16 microcontroller and their pro-C compiler for programming their PIC controllers. The second part is about USB connectivity for embedded systems design which again was one of their lectures for 10$. The last one is the very interesting one which is harvesting the solar energy to power up the main electrical grid....It was like a product info class but still the concepts were good though obsolete...

1) Coming to the Enhanced PIC16 microcontrollers, PIC controllers follow the Harvard architecture unlike the Von-Neumann architecture which follows the method wherein there is a common memory space for both data and code... In case of Harvard architecture, the code and memory areas are different which owes its speed compared to the other architecture..also adding coding complexities to the system.....
I noted some features of PIC16 in my notebook during the lecture...Hope some of them would be useful..

Enhanced Mid-range Core with 49 Instruction, 16 Stack Levels 
Flash Program Memory with self read/write capability 
96 LCD segment drive support 
Internal 32MHz oscillator 
Integrated Capacitive mTouch Sensing Module 
MI2C, SPI, EUSART w/auto baud 
3 ECCP & 2 CCP (Enhanced/Capture Compare PWM) 
Comparators with selectable Voltage Reference 
14 Channel 10b ADC with Voltage Reference 
25mA Source/Sink current I/O 
Four 8-bit Timers (TMR0/TMR2/TMR4/TMR6) 
One 16-bit Timer (TMR1) 
Extended Watchdog Timer (EWDT) 
Enhanced Power-On/Off-Reset 
Brown-Out Reset (BOR) 
In Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) 
Wide Operating Voltage (1.8V – 5.5V) 
Low Power PIC16LF1939 variant (1.8V – 3.6V)







You can just google out the specifications in the google searc tab which i have provided in
my blog at the bottom.....
I even have a google book embedded in the books store of my blog...Fell free to visit them....
Coming to Pro-C compiler, here are some snapshots which i managed to rip up from their website...
I mean they only told the entire C language fundamentals...
Not much stress was laid on the core of the topic itself....Funny........

• Linker
  
  
  • Added a new linker command-line switch, --sort-section name|alignment, to sort sections by section name or maximum alignment.
  • Added SORT_BY_NAME and SORT_BY_ALIGNMENT to the linker script language to permit sorting sections by section name or section maximum alignment.
  • New switch: --print-gc-sections to list any sections removed by garabge collection.
  • Addded a new command-line option '--default-script=FILE' or '-dT FILE' which specifies a replacement for the built-in, default linker script.
  • Linker scripts support a new INSERT command that makes it easier to augment the default script.
  • Linker-script input-section filespecs may now specify a file within an archive by writing "archive:file".
  • The --sort-common switch now has an optional argument which specifies the direction of sorting.
  • The Linker sources are now released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

 

• Binary Utilities
  
  
  
  • pic32-readelf can now display address ranges from .debug_range sections. This happens automatically when a DW_AT_range attribute is encountered. The command line switch --debug-dump=Ranges (or -wR) can also be used to display the contents of the .debug_range section.
  • pic32-objcopy recognizes two new options, --strip-unneeded-symbol and --strip-unneeded-symbols, namely for use together with the wildcard matching the original --strip-symbol/--strip-symbols provided, but retaining any symbols matching but needed by relocations.
  • Added -g/--section-groups to pic32-readelf to display section groups.
  • Added --globalize-symbol and --globalize-symbols switches to pic32-objcopy to convert local symbols into global symbols.
  • Added -t/--section-details to pic32-readelf to display section details
  • Added -W/--dwarf to pic32-objdump to display the contents of the DWARF debug sections.
  • Added -wL switch to dump decoded contents of .debug_line.
  • Added -F switch to pic32-objdump to include file offsets in the disassembly.
  • Added -c switch to pic32-readelf to allow string dumps of archive symbol index.
  • Added -p switch to pic32-readelf to allow string dumps of sections.
  • The Binutils sources are now released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  2) Coming to the USB part, ill try to brief you with some of the main concepts which i know and learnt there....USB is a mechanism by which the host can access resources by the method of PnP or Plug n  Play....They are generally hot swap devices which means that you have no need to power down your system to remove and deallocate the resource handles. Let me explain this with a scenario. Consider your own PC. This has a USB port. This single USB has the ability to support a maximum of 127 devices. Dont expect that you can use a hub and multiply this number. In USB all devices acts as nodes as if they were directly connected to the host or in this case your PC and it doesn't matter how many hubs are placed between your PC and your device. The PC will not bother to differentiate this as a hubbed connection or as a stand alone connection( direct connection). When you see your USB port i.e the one on your PC, it is a standard A type USB interface. Always the host will have a A type connector. There is a reduced size version of the connector called as the B connector which you might see on many target boards. There is another flat type yet same length as that of the A type is called as the mini-B type.Same length but shorter width...........Now there is another type in fact the last one called as the micro B which you would generally find on your mobile phones. Let me get into the hardware details. the USB cable are of 3 categories based on the speed of data transmission.....The first is the USB 1.1, then are USB 2.0, USB 3.0 which happens to be the latest high speed stuff....The cable will have 4 wires of which two are related to power and other two related to data transmission.There is actually no need for focusing anything beyond USB1.1 as the embedded systems need this USB mainly for the purpose of burning the code onto the RAM of the smart device and not for communicating with the host always...So for the purpose of writing the program onto the flash chip, USB 1.1 would do a lot at the present day......Generally there will be a USB interface controller to synchronize with the target device. This can be a dedicated controller or can be any microcontroller with a USB support doing the job of the USB controller...More details regarding this can be found in the two books which i have embedded in the books store.....
  
  3) Lastly i would wish to tell about the solar energy harvesting concept that they have developed...Pretty simple.....U have a solar panel which would harvest nearly 100W power...you feed this to a buck-boost inverter circuit...a pretty complex one...this produces the required voltage which gould drive back the current into the grid which inturn means charging the main electrical grid...there has been many incentives by the government ...specifically in germany, there is an incentive of 0.39$ per watt generation of power fed into the grid.....coming back to the circuit, the buck-boost voltage is then sensed by a microcontroller ( a PIC controller ). The controller also senses the main line voltage and phase...by matching the inverter's phase to that of the main line, the power is forced into the grid....thereby you can actually make the electric usage meter to run back........There is a wide scope for development in this sector...lot of government incentives also provided....Hope u may take this development as your career sometime.......
  
  
  

First Day Experience in ESC India 2010

Well let me just get into the topic of what i learnt on the first day by attending the ESC seminar rather than telling the colourful details of my experience.
Let me divide this discussion into 2.In the first part i will be explaining as well as providing you with some links about MEMS and its applications where you can get a new feel of todays technology. In the second part i will be talking about the MSP430 microcontroller of Texas Instruments.


1) MEMS are the markers of technical development in the electronic industry. It stands for Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems. If you wish to create a touch sensor or basically a pressure sensor, generally a capacitor sensor would be the traditional idea. In case of the capacitive sensors, one end of the capacitor plate will be generally fixed and the other end will be fixed to the surface where you would wish to measure the pressure, force or even the touch effect. So this plate experiences mechanical force and then moves. So the distance between the capacitor plates changes. Suppose a particular voltage is applied across the capacitor before the displacement could occur, there will be certain voltage V (say). When the plates move, the capacitance of the capacitor will change. This will cause the previously applied voltage across the capacitor to change as well. This change in voltage is then fed to a ADC(Analog to digital convertor) which later when fed to some logical circuit or smart chips like microprocessors or microcontrollers can determine the exact force applied or even the pressure. But the latest MEMS will have these mechanical structures etched out right on the silicon wafers of the chip. So there is no need to arrange a capacitor - ADC setup for getting the converted signals from the sensor. The entire setup can be present in a single chip which can also be designed to even give a processed value of force, pressure etc...
Nowadays, these MEMS devices are used to create accelerometers which measures the acceleration, also a good gyroscope to measure the rotational inertia, motion sensors which can sense motion in 3 dimensions is possible.
For more details refer my books collection page which has 2 books on MEMS. The first one is really good as it mainly focuses on application oriented concepts. I have read it and you can rely on me and start with it if you do wanna start reading some books on MEMS. The second book is on how to develop MEMS. More of physics and material chemistry...Dont curse me if you find it uninteresting.


2) Coming to the MSP430 microcontrollers, it is a low power highly efficient RISC processor core controller from Texas Instruments. It works at really low powers. Works in the input voltage range of 1.8 - 3.6 V. There are many advanced features like it supports JTAG, has a watchdog timer inbuilt, great compatibility....
Texas Instruments has a great product support for this product. Kindly visit this link for more and authoritative information
www.ti.com/msp430

ESC Bangalore 2010

Hello folks.......
             
              Sorry for not publishing any posts for so many days.....Well in this post i would like to tell about the ESC Bangalore conference that was held back in July during 21 - 23....
             
             Firstly i would like to tell what ESC is. ESC { www.esc.com } stands for Embedded Systems Conference which is a global group who mainly perform the job of conducting various conferences related to electronics and Embedded systems development all over the globe. This time in India, it was conducted in Bangalore in NIMHANS Convention Center. This was sponsored by many leading companies like Microchip, STMicroelectronics, Greenhills Software and organized by UBM India.....
The main focus of this conference was Developing ARM processors, Debugging tools and techniques, Multi-core, Multi-Threading and virtualisation, Multimedia and signal processing, RTOS, System integration and testing. Many lecture sessions were conducted for the conference delegates by some of the industry leads like Michael Barr who is a globally recognized expert on design of embedded computer systems, Clive Maxfield whose expertise is in the field of ASIC development and has authore many books, Robert Oshana a senior member of IEEE, Bob Ziedman the founder of Ziedman consulting with a prime focus on RISC and the list goes on......There were many exhibit stalls hosted by nearly 22 companies......
             
              Let me tell you about my experience about the Conference...I will divide this into 3 posts so that it would be easy to access and read....