~ 24 Oct 2011, 03:08
A wise guy once said, „Assembly language programming is an extravagant waste of human talent and should be avoided whenever possible“.
While the previous week I was playing around with SimNow, ucbench and assembly language for x86, this weekend (partly as a tribute to the recently deceased master, Dennis Ritchie (R.I.P., dmr!)), I went for a higher-level language on a lower-level CPU: C for PIC.
That Peter Norton quote on the top is soooooo true¹, applied to my last PIC project; it is partly finished, but there's still a lot of not-very-hard-but-obtrusively-massive code left to be written. Thus, the mentioned waste comes easily to mind, and the temptation to avoid it is very hard to resist. So, to start clean, I went from scratch, on a new (but easier) project, new breadbord and all. I'm using Hi-tech's C compiler, and this is the first test program that I wrote:
Click (h.264 format - opens fine VLC).
Whether the ways of C could be successfully applied to the "big" project is left to be checked - as even the tiny program on the video utilizes some 10% of the code memory, and also around 10% of the data, too. Yet, there's hope - I wasn't sure I'd have the mental persistence to write that amount of assembly :)
There was a fun moment with the electronics I bought: I needed a good 3.3V low-dropout regulator, and, after some research, I settled on the MCP1703. I bought it along with some other parts, but haven't checked the purchases until I got home. I didn't see the regulator in the bag at first, and thought they must have forgotten to put it. Then... I saw it... It's just unreal: I was expecting something like this, while it turned out like that instead (see the arrow)... You should have seen what's it like to solder pins to that thing! Having completed this feat, I bet I could now solder wires to a grain of sand, too... :)
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¹ even though that smart ass didn't write even a single line of anything, except assembly, for the first few versions of Norton Commander :)
#1 by feydun, posted on 15 Mar 2012, 07:25
There's no way to delete the email address from a comment - or edit it - or even add a comment. I didn't realise it would be harvestable.
#2 by anrieff, posted on 15 Mar 2012, 14:22
Hi. Sorry for the confusion about the e-mail. I'll add some warnings in the posting code, to address this issue. I also removed your e-mail from your previous post.
#3 by feydun, posted on 16 Mar 2012, 07:26
Thank you :-)
Keep up the good work!
