Simple multi-channel serial ADC (8-ch)?

Never used one of those. In my lab I had two Viewsonic but they went to the recycler because their job had been taken over by PCs. One thing I must say is that those terminals had tens of thousands of hours on them yet never let me down.

AFAICT they don't, and actually migrated a bit away from JTAG with the new F2xxx family. The old ones can usually be bootloaded quite well.

If that box is really small it would work.

Yep, and one is coming. That one must have a uC because it'll have to transmit data via wireless.

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Tell that to the Honeywell Engineers who are recalling their products built with flash based uC. Show me how to convince my customer who would never consider "flash" permanent.

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My target is a lunch box (in size), but there is no reason why you can't use a PDA or cell phone (with usb). There are cell phones running on Linux and internet connected.

Stand-alone ADC boards can be made quite versatile. It's all controllable via registers and stuff. That can also be done with a uC but the issues that tend to creep up there is noise from the uC itself. On acquisition boards with uC we usually needed several iterations to optimize sleep modes etc. Not required with a plain ADC board because it's quiet the microsecond the SPI clock stops. But you are right, if there was a hard bug it would be a re-design.

Hi Jörg,

You should look in NGs and Web around and ask by the sourgeforge folks. And of course look the appnotes from TI. The salesmen often don't know the tools in backstage. They know the Features they want to sell...

Wondering !?! A few years ago, long before the f2xxx was released, they marks exact this feature: a propper brown-out circuit in their MSP430F1xy and f4xy

go to the next university hang a sheet of paper out there with a promise of a few dollars and you will get this job done very quickly.

may be you can deliver teh clock for µC this way external, without the usage from internal fll.

Marte

It wasn't the sales folks whom I asked :-)

I know, some of them do. But a lot of them don't and I never really understood why not.

Sure. But this time I was able to do without ;-)

With a fully static design that works. The only thing you have to pay attention to, usually, is the AD converter in there. Some concepts go haywire if you take the clock away in the middle of the game. IIRC some

Was it caused by flash memory loss? If so, please let us know which uC that was if you are at liberty to tell. Might avoid some black eyes.

Hi Jörg,

Even cracks don't know all these very special things.

Sure, you have allways to know what you do ;-) Several SD needs more than 3 Cycles to get valid results. SD converters are designed to convert streams not single samples. Therefore they usually don't have a S&H or such things and more often they have included filters...

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Flash is just my guess. It was in the news for recalling a few hundred AT91SAM7S256. I sometimes have strange results with AVR flash as well. I don't know if they are built with the same process, or if it's just a certain batch.

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So you have customers that reject any flash based designs?

The ADM3 was a very early glass teletype. One of the first in the "Low cost" category. They were built to last a lifetime. I think I still have a complete unit, but I scrapped a lot of them for the nice LV power transformers.

Well, suppose there was such a routine (which AFAIK there isn't) and the top notch guys at a company would not know about a tool with so much marketing power. Then it would be time for a huge organizational structuring effort. Because it would mean that there is a company that doesn't know where its assets are. I doubt that's the case with TI.

Which is why, I guess, parts like the MSP430F2013 wouldn't cut it in this application.

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No, they insist on being able to reprogram it in the field (at the very least), as well as remotely probing the flash for verifications. A local Window station monitors the remote targets' flash and data memories, that part of it is working fine. We are currently working on remotely programming an ARM Cortex M3 using remote gdb server on the targets.

We are still trying to figure out the best way to do it. One solution is to create a virtual flash port on the gdb server. Namely, a block of registers interpreted by the gdb server and jtag into flash. For example, Flash Address Register (FAR), Flash Data Register (FDR), Flash Control Register (FCR) and Flash Status Register (FSR). They should be a reserved block not used by ARM and/or vendors (LMI, TI and ST are prospective vendors).

We already have the ability to access real or virtual registers, as well as sram. In response to the FCR, the gdb server jtag/swd a small program on sram to rewrite the flash.

By the way, a single monitor station could track/maintain several remote stations miles away. Actual sample rates (both system and apps data) are very low (HZs), so it could be done with GSM/GPRS as well. Of course, the targets are firewalled to talk to authorized IPs only.

Actually, this discussion should really be in comp.arch.embedded

FWIW, while browsing around for some other parts I found the Analog Devices AD7928. An 8-ch ADC that also comes in 10-bit and 8-bit flavors and has a reasonable street price. Both the config string and required HW handshake look quite clean. Nice part.