Lpc2000

--- In lpc2000@yahoogroups.com, "microbit" <microbit@c...> wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> 
> The IsoMax approach seems rather innovative.
> I don't have a direct need for such thing on ARM, as I'm quite tied
> up with my RF product on MSP430 (but it's ready to port to ARM).
> 
> This is something I'd certainly be interested to visit at a later stage.
> 
> Another question : Does IsoMax assist with identifying dead states
> and the like ? Or is this completely left to the user ?

 No direct tools but it is easy enough to build your own although it depends
 on the speed of the states and how you want to detect it.  An easy way is
 to print to the display but this can easliy overload the display with 
 too much text.  Another way would be to OR bits in a variable and then
 after testing, the variable could be queried.  A third way is to use the
 three LEDs to display one of eight conditions.  When I was building a
 state machine for the soft UART, I wired up all the transitions to different
 LED settings.  Just observing the flashing LEDs gave me a visual
 indication of how the state machine was running and enabled me to
 debug it.
 
> 
> Some other comments :
> 
> [snip]
> > external tools to support it.  As for VHDL, I've programmed in that
> > as well but while it tries to be like embedded programming
> > languages, it is a lot more cumbersome to use and the target is
> > specifically hardware usually gate arrays.  
> 
> Taste again I guess :-)
> I prefer it over Verilog because you can have functions.
> It is indeed rather verbose though :-)

 Agreed.  I also get burned tho when something works in simulation
 but won't compile for the target because the target lacks resources.
 This happened for division.  I could use it fine in simulation but for
 the hardware, I had to define my own division module.  Ack!  When
 programming a micro, this doesn't happen.

 Rob