After searching for ages for an 8051 board I can develop stuff on I finally gave up and made my own. Its not like I wanted anything really advanced, just easy to use and easy to debug...
A few colleagues have bought them and reckon they're cool so we've put them on our website for anyone who is interested.
Not everyone is looking for made up kits so the boards are available separately for those that would like to make their own.
BTW: An unlimited assembler for 8051 can be had for free. The 8051 is easy enough to program in ASM that I'd even suggest a hobbiest try it, so if the TI one doesn't include a compiler but does have the debugging stuff it would be a good option.
The compiler being used is the SDCC open-source one. I'm making no attempt to say its perfect for every job, its just something I've used for some time and find useful.
Regarding programming in assembly, I totally agree - its only when you're at the nuts and bolt level that you can really understand what the processor is doing. I always feel that things like C are a trade off between (speed of development and ease) vs (execution speed, code compactness and optimisation) on the other.
I guess one benefit of the SDCC is you can paste inline assembly quite easily and lace it in with the rest of the code for critical bits of code.
Thanks for the info on Cygnal being 50MIPs, that is pretty nippy I must say. I've used Dallas Maxim chips that have a single cycle instruction architecture - its good to know they have completition!
I will have a look at the ti and cygnal stuff again so I'm up to date.
many thanks for the info - you neverstop learning with electronics !
Actually, I may not even agree that C saves time in development. In order to use C, you need to go with a much higher performance micro with more RAM and ROM. This often blows you out of a single chip solution into a multichip one. The more stuff in a design, the longer it generally takes.
In both C and Assembly, I usually spend more time designing the software than actually coding it up.
I've been having trouble getting the 12 bit ADC to perform but I'm working on another part of my project right now. Fairly soon, I'll have to come back to that problem.
Well I'd agree that the first chip you'll probably add with be SRAM! Then probably glue logic to get the ram to work, yep good point Ken!
What ADC are you using, I've tended to interface to external ones in the past for simple battery monitoring etc. Only dead basic ones like 8-bit AD08831 that are SPI or I2C. Be interested to hear what other people are using - often word of mouth is how a good chip gets known.
--
regards
Brian Clark
E-Mail : brian.clark@clayzer.com
Web : www.clayzer.com
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Be careful trying to super-glue nylon-bodied Molex connectors to a phenolic board (like a light-brownish RS perfboard) - I was trying to glue a Molex connector to a piece of perfboard once, and while I was pushing down on the ends of the pins with my thumb, and trying to hold the board steady with the rest of my fingers, of course, as soon as I applied any appreciable pressure, the connector escaped. POP! It goes sailing into the air, only to land on the floor right in the aisle behind my bench, and who should be walking by at that precise moment, but my engineer, who was also nominally my boss. So he sees the Molex connector hit the floor in front of him, landing right almost exactly in the spot where his next footprint would have landed, and "Oh!" he hesitates, stops, stoops over, and picks up the connector, saying, "Hey, Rich, did you drop this?" (Or he might have said, "Lose something, Rich?" but you get the point). He went to casually toss it back onto my bench into the pile of other parts that are usually there, and much to his surprise, and my great amusement, the Molex connector had superglued itself to his finger. ;-)
So, anyway, be careful about supergluing stuff - the only stuff I've ever seen superglue adhese reliably is human skin, which isn't all that surprising, after all, when you consider that the etymology/ancestry/lineage of superglue was that they were looking for some adhesive that they could use on skin instead of stitches. Or staples. I don't know why it never caught on - I've found it great for just that sort of thing.
And, of course, skin is the _only_ thing I've ever been able to get superglue to stick anything to. )-;
Well, I'm gonna chime in here on behalf of Rich the Techie, because as duck fupped as I am, I concur whole heartedly about learning 8051 ASM. Just because I fell in love with the Motorola HC11 when someone presented me with a whole product to dick around with the design of, and a development system, doesn't mean that I have anything uncomplimentary to say about the 8051.
In fact, come to think of it, One time while between projects, and freeloading off this one babe, she came home one evening after having visited, of all places, the Orange County (CA) fair. She said that she had seen some guy in a booth selling robots and had somehow occasioned to chat him up - she must have picked up some kind of vibe - At the time I was a tech playing Engineer on tv, OK? I had just shot myself in the foot and talked myself right out of a US$27.00/hr gig - in 1988 - I bought a 2-story, 3-bedroom town house (like a condo, but you get a mortgage), for US$120,000. I bought a Ford Mustang off the showroom for way more than I should have paid for it, back in the days when you could negotiate with car dealers.
I was on an open-ended contract. I had a PO for Quantity Unit of issue Item Each Price 2 LOT Programming services $27.00 TBD
And didn't know what a f****ng gold mine that was. I was also attending New Age "Get Rich Today By Following These Simple Positive Thinking Things" classes - or seminars, or speeches, or presentations - they took place at this huge expensive new- age church in Huntington Beach (CA), the church of Divine Science or Religious Science - that's it - Religious Science. The Divine Science church is the one in Irvine where I was a staffer for awhile.
Anyways, the lectures were encouraging me, since I'd obviously reached the Napoleon Hill threshold ("Just visualize it and you can have it - become one with Infinite Intelligence!") I decided, in 1988, with my only credentials being "electronic tech in the USAF and been programming since he could get his hands on computers", I demanded more money and a rewrite of the contract. Three months later, I was on my own. Of course, having never learned to get actual customers, and with the cocky attitude of the newly successful new-ager, I went totally free-lance. I put an ad in the paper. When credit card companies or loan sharks, or whatever they were, would send me a check for $1000.00 out of the clear blue sky, with a little letter where the fine print says, "Your signing of this check signifies acceptance of the terms and conditions of this loan", what the frap? They Sent Me Money! So I used the credit card company checks to pay the mortgage payments for awhile.
When it got so bad (i.e., broke because I didn't know how to find work) that I had to break down and sell the house, it was in 1989, and the selling price was $140,000.00. It paid off the mortgage (and, I think, cleared my GI, if I want to spend a couple mil on a house! ;-p ), got caught up on the association dues, got caught up on all of the rest of the bills, and there was $320.00 left over for me, I still had the car, and the girl was stilll letting me hang out at her place. In fact, she let me put a bunch of crap in her garage for awhile. But, that's an entirely nother story - what was my point?
Oh, yeah! The 8051! Maybe I should start over. While hanging out with this babe, she noticed the guy at the county fair in one of the booths, selling robots, or something like that, and it somehow came to light that he'd be interested talking to somebody who could work out a remote control device of some kind where wheelchair-bound people could give commands to this robot. He had a working model, albeit it was controlled by a couple of joysticks - it could pick up a can of soda pop and pour it into the customer's mouth, as long as the customer operated both joysticks simultaneously.
What he was interested in was voice control. Now, he'd already solved the "remote control" problem - he had just tracked down some heavy duty Futaba motor controllers and some wheelchair motors. This robot had a footprint about the size of your desk chair and your feet. But it had an arm on top that was very much like a little cherry-picker. But this poor robot body - which had a fiberglass skin that made it look like, o, geez, lemme think - The base part of the "Hoveround". And it went forward by having the joystick at 45 degrees, and just controlling the speed of the two motors (it was a caster in front) linearly by pot. (pun semi-intended, but if you've read this far, you're stuck, so let's go!) With speed 0 in the middle, of course. I guess you have to cross-couple them, or something.
Anyway, the point is that this guy had just heard of some company just a couple of suburbs away, who were marketing a "Butler-in-a-Box". It was a, well, box, about the size of a, oh, textbood. Maybe a foot tall, maybe eight inches wide, and about three inches thick, that stood upright on the shelf, and had a mic, a speaker, and some kind of digital display. And you could program it to accept voice commands, and control your X10 crap. The guy who had the one I saw in action had named it "Adam." And to demo his Butler in a Box, he'd shout out, "Adam!" and this box would say "Yeth, Mathter?"
Anyways, I designed an 8051 - actually, 8035, which is an
8051 with external PROM (EPROM), that would accept serial ASCII and translate it into Futaba PWM signals. And then, I had to make a test box, which was toggle switches and a shift register.
We finally talked the "Butler in a box" people into releasing enough of their control codes that we were ready for a demo. My 8035 is faithfully accepting commands from the voice box, and we're ready for a demo. The Boss says, "Up". And it started moving up. The main arm of this 6-foot tall cherry-picker arm, which just happened to have a linear actuator that consisted of a lead screw and the noisiest motor that there has ever been. The noise from the leadscrew swamped the mike, so we were not able to give the "STOP!" command, and so the motor hit the stop, the fuse blew, and the "Butler in a Box" people threw us and our robot out of their conference room.
That was when I started working on my voice input device, but that's an entirely nother story.
And since I'm under the affluence o fincohol, and a little bit of natural herb, I'm not boing to gother to proofread this, because it would spoil the fun at this end. :-)
Maybe I should blog.
Maybe sci.electronics.design is a meta-blog! Have you ever met a blog that you've liked? ?:-\\
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