VC21RB1 board comes alive..

Three posts in one day... A crowded house ;) and probably the topic of some kids docturate somewhere

Hopefully the Virtual Cogs guys aren't reading this (sorry Tarun and Dan if you are). I pushed them at the end of last year to release some example code to driver the motor controller board, VC21RB1. Huge credit to them they did release more than expected. Including a lovely way of using I2C to communicate between the VCMX212 and VC21RB1 :D

Since receiving the Virtual Cogs boards I couldn't remember if I had even tried to determine if the VC21RB1 board was working. All the other delivered boards I had tried, think this one was waiting for some test software before I tried it out. Anyway..

Last night I grabbed the VC21RB1 I2C demo code and apps from the VC wiki. Sorted out a new OpenOCD server connection to the VC21RB1 JTAG. And tried reflashing the VC21RB1 with the example code, which worked first time :) Uploaded the VCMX212 accompanying code with Hyperterminal Ymodem. And launched the Win APP to squirt commands down the USB-UART to the VCMX212, and further via I2C to the VC21RB1. I must admit I did a litte dance when that all worked first time!!! :)

The new motor controller is ALIVE!! :) Superb news. I can now have a look at connecting up some motors, etc..

EFSL (Embedded Filesystems Library)

With the issues faced with uMon FATFS (see last blog post), it was a pleasure to come across EFSL. A little confusing though. The latest stable tarball is 0.2.8, whereas the stable CVS is 0.2.9 :S I had a look at the latest development release in CVS, but looks completely different and un-worked on for quite a few months now.

As with DOSFS/FATFS it only needs three functions to be hooked in. Init, single block read (512 bytes), and similar single block write. Perfect! Just the same requirements as the CF/DOSFS interface in uMon :)

Hooking up the SD driver code was easy. Creating a simple uMon API based test app, just as easy. And bonus, it all worked first time. Result!!

Even though having SD card support within uMon is nice. It's nicer to know that with EFSL I can use that standalone or within uMon API test apps.