Creat: An Embedded Systems Project

Creat stands for Combined Resource Embedded Application Toolkit. It is a collection of tools pulled together from the Internet to permit Linux users (and, in the future, any UNIX users) to construct simple projects based on the Motorola MC68HC811 8-bit microcontroller. For the hardware part of the project, the idea was to provide a general microcontroller for students who wanted to have a small lump of computing power in their final-year projects; for those who wanted to specialize in applied microcomputing, to study the innards of the project. I wanted it to be accessible enough from “both ends”--programming and hardware—so that an expert in one would benefit from experience with the other. The whole project turned out to be a positive experience and a lesson in the benefits of cooperation and open software.

In choosing hardware for the exercise, I would have liked to obtain an up-market 16-bit microcontroller with Linux ported to it. This would have given seamless integration between host machine and target platforms, but even now, the cost of such a project is prohibitive in both cash and development time. The monster thus created would probably have been a significant overkill for the target application areas. At the very low end, the Linux community already has a range of useful utilities aimed at the PIC microprocessor (see “PIC Programming with Linux” by Brian C. Lane, Linux Journal, October 1998), which is a useful chip for replacing large quantities of logic with a single package. More ambitious projects might make use of a microcontroller port of Linux itself (see the Linux/Microcontroller Home Page by D. Jeff Dionne, http://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/uCinux/). My target was those projects in between: more processing power than you need to count events and run a multiplexed LED display and less than you need to run X. Our typical projects had an LCD display, a keyboard and some custom electronics to handle the project-specific I/O. The handling of interrupts might be important, together with enough flexibility to store a reasonable amount of data. The projects need to be highly testable and modifiable, but in the interests of economy, special hardware adapters and programmers were to be avoided.

With limited time and money, the clear way forward was to trawl the Net. More than just the hardware must be considered to build a useful system. To compete with the large and expensive kits in the marketplace, I would need an in-circuit emulator, a compiler/assembler and some way of downloading the program and booting the target board. For the benefit of the hard-line computer scientist, in-circuit emulators are expensive devices which plug into the microcontroller socket at one end and the workstation at the other. They do all the things done by a decent IDE, but can also ensure the hardware is behaving by monitoring bus control signals and the like. For microcontrollers, students are encouraged to plug in a logic analyzer instead: rather like an oscilloscope with an enormous number of channels and triggering, which can be locked to a particular data value and hence to the execution of a particular instruction. You don't get to see a stack trace or register contents, but you can examine exactly what is going on in terms of logic levels.

At the University of Leeds, all Electronic Engineering graduates are familiar with C. Those who specialize in computer subjects will also probably have picked up some parsing, X Window System applications programming, Java or C++ and Occam. The major requirement is to provide them with “right-first-time” prototyping tools, so that they can debug programs on workstations and get them “shipped” with as little ado as possible. The environment within which they are performing their project actually makes quite a good analogy to a commercial one: too little money and too big a time pressure to craft the most beautiful and elegant system imaginable. One thing the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering doesn't have is the facility to make plated-through PCBs (polyclorobenzine circuit boards). It is too expensive to run because of severe environmental problems associated with the technology. It is possible for students to produce single or double-sided copper boards by photo lithography and etching (and they have), but plating through and the production of microcontroller boards is truly out of the question. Thus, we need to make boards for general application. We have them manufactured externally on large panels and cut up, so they can be used as the brain of an electrically more simple project built on a circuit board manufactured in-house.

The Creat specification required the following: