The importance of knoledge sharing (one year after)

Ok, it is about one year and a half that I have shared my idea by publishing them on my "A few bits of code" web site.

The number of visit is increasing each month as showed in the above picture. It is not a success story but I'm happy to have had the opportunity to discuss about embedded technology with so many people. Until today I received more than 300 mails and I followed about 100 discussions. Sometime I had the right answer, sometime I didn't success. In each case my know-how is increasing thanks to all these question I received, that focused my attention.

Even if three hundred e-mails is not so much during one year, it is not so easy to reply to all due to this is not my primary work. Many time I received a question more than one time from different people, and I searched in my e-mail to quick find the answer (thank spothlight! ;-). Other time I was so full that I delayed the reply for too long time. I apologize.
For these reason I think that the e-mail is not always the best tool to discuss about my shared bits of code. For these reason I setup the open discussion forum: everyone could access the knowledge in the forum for free. To search for an answer in the forum is more quick than wait for a reply to an e-mail. More over, in the forum we can find more people able to solve a problem better than me! ;-)

So, I definitively suggest to use the forum to ask for support.

All this effort is focused on my idea (that is each day more clear): ODeV. It is both a way to develop embedded application based on the multitasking approach, and a set of tools focused to make this approach easy and based on Eclipse. I hope to release the first ODeV plug-ins in the next year, 2010. :-)

The ODeV idea (#1)

Look at the following picture.

It shows a debugging session of the STM32 FreeRTOS demo. I use Eclipse (on the left) to debug my firmware... for sure! Let me call it Eclipse1.

But... The most interesting thing happens on the right side of the picture. It is Eclipse (another instance), and it is debugging Eclipse1!!

This is an extension of the debugger I'm working on. This is a piece of the ODeV idea. This is the power of Eclipse.

There are a lot of thing I need to study about the Eclipse Debug Framework, so... I come back to study! :-)

Stefano

STM32-P103 board

This post was moved in the forum of the web site: http://developsers.stf12.net

See the A few bits of code forum.

tiny error

This post was moved in the forum of the web site: http://developsers.stf12.net

See the A few bits of code forum.

24th January 2009

Happy 25 Birthday Macintosh

128 KB of RAM, 64 KB of ROM; Motorola MC68000 at 8MHz and 500 byte of cache; 400 KB single-sided 3.5 inch floppy drive; built-in one-bit black-and-white 9-inch CRT display with a resolution of 512×342 pixels; 8-bit sampled monaural sound at the 22.25 kHz horizontal blanking rate; Mac OS

Think Different

The ODeV idea

Why only two MCU?
Why only manual managed Makefile?
Why long time-consuming debug sessions?
Why not application ad-hoc integrated tools?

The Eclipse revolution takes the power of hi-end software development tools into embedded world. The Eclipse open architecture allows to customize the IDE both, for general embedded multitasking development, and for end-application specific features.

For example I could image a Plug-in to trace the tasks context switch during a debug session, and plot the result in a graphical manner. I could have also a Plug-in displaying a GUI to configure a motor control application (SPEED, PID, etc.) and automatically generate the needed source files.

This is the ODeV idea (http://developers.stf12.net/odev)

I'm working on it. I'm analyzing it. I will update both this post and the web page.

Should you be interested on this idea, or if you would like to contribute to this idea, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Stefano