[ECOS] Newbie Questions

[ECOS] Newbie Questions

[Greg White]

First, thanks for reading this and having tolerance for my ignorance ... <grin>

I have a (relatively) simple project to perform some computational tasks 
using an
embedded microcontroller.  The complexity comes from the need for transparency
in both the hardware and software.  By transparency, I mean that the 
software and
hardware must be as simple as possible, contain minimal extra features, and
that the software must be completely available in source code form.  Open 
source
code is preferable to proprietary source code.

The other complication is the need to run solely off ROM and RAM with no
writeable, non-volatile memory (flash, eeprom, battery backed up RAM, etc).

The first "project" is to monitor some switches (digital inputs), wait for 
a short ASCII
message from 1 or 2 serial ports, do some simple math on the result, and 
light some
lights using digital outputs.

Later projects would be more complex, including communicating with other
microcontrollers controlling various kinds of sensors over serial and ethernet.

I am a software guy, so my bias would be to buy someone else's board, and start
writing software for it.  This also would allow the (hopefully) inherent 
increase
in reliability of a commercial board, instead of a one-off custom design.

The daughter boards from Cogent seem to be a possibility, but I am unclear
whether they can be seperated from the motherboards.

ECOS seems the natural solution to the problem for a number of reasons: 
small footprint,
open source OS and tools (compilers, debuggers, etc), multiple targets, 
expandable
level capabilities (simple serial communication to complex TCP/IP apps).

Previous implementations were PC/104 x86 machines with BIOS, MSDOS and
Visual C implementations.  They contained lots of closed source code, flash
memory and weren't too stable over the long haul.

I have looked through the supported evaluation boards at the ECOS supported
hardware list, but none seem to be the right set of features.

Some questions...

1.  Am I headed in the right direction for the OS choice?

2.  Would another OS choice be better?

3.  Any suggestions on hardware choices or options would be appreciated.

4.  Am I completely clueless and should be taken out back and put out of my 
misery <grin>?

Thanks in advance,
Greg

Re: [ECOS] Newbie Questions

[Lewin A.R.W. Edwards]

>The first "project" is to monitor some switches (digital inputs), wait for 
>a short ASCII message from 1 or 2 serial ports, do some simple math on the 
>result, and light some lights using digital outputs.
>Later projects would be more complex, including communicating with other
>microcontrollers controlling various kinds of sensors over serial and 
>ethernet.
>
>I am a software guy, so my bias would be to buy someone else's board, and 
>start writing software for it.  This also would allow the (hopefully) 
>inherent increase in reliability of a commercial board, instead of a 
>one-off custom design.
>
>I have looked through the supported evaluation boards at the ECOS supported
>hardware list, but none seem to be the right set of features.

I think eCos is probably a good match to your needs. It is (or can be) 
small, deterministic and it's open-source. If your application is nice and 
goes through eCos APIs to access the hardware, others who download your 
code will be able to port it to other platforms easily. You've also got 
out-of-box support for

You don't mention whether or not cost is an important factor. If it isn't, 
then I suggest you look at the Cirrus EDB7212 eval board, as it has 
seemingly all your requirements (that you mention, anyway) on-board. You 
would just need to wire up your external switches and lights [with 
appropriate external driver transistors if necessary] and plug in the 
Ethernet cable. However, the Cirrus board will cost you more than US$1500 
per unit.

For my money, it is easier for me to cope with buying a cheap bare-bones 
board like the ARM AEB-1 [now discontinued, replaced by the Evaluator-7T] 
or Atmel AT91EB40, and adding whatever hardware I need externally.

=== Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (Embedded Engineer)
Work: http://www.digi-frame.com/
Personal: http://www.zws.com/ and http://www.larwe.com/

"Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein."

[ECOS] Newbie questions

[Madhu Lakshmanan]

Does Redboot for an x86 platform assume that chipsets
like the Northbridge, Southbridge, etc., are
initialized by a BIOS?

Can I use the current / latest Redboot sources to
create a Redboot for a generic x86 PC which _does not_
have a BIOS?

Thanks,

Madhu Lakshmanan



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Re: [ECOS] Newbie questions

[Iztok Zupet]

On Thursday 18 July 2002 03:34, Madhu Lakshmanan wrote:
> Does Redboot for an x86 platform assume that chipsets
> like the Northbridge, Southbridge, etc., are
> initialized by a BIOS?
>
> Can I use the current / latest Redboot sources to
> create a Redboot for a generic x86 PC which _does not_
> have a BIOS?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Madhu Lakshmanan
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes
> http://autos.yahoo.com

 You can try RedBoot ROM target (very experimental) and burn it to Your BIOS 
flash/eprom.

Regards
iz

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Re: [ECOS] Newbie questions

[Jose Souto]

Hi Madhu,

Your answer is yes.
You need a bios customized to your hardware that does at least CPU
registers configuration (if needed), SDRAM memory controller configuration
(and basic memory test - for sanity), Super I/O and COM1 38400-8N1
programming or any other serial port support and network interface
configuration, if you intend to use RedBoot with network support.

The last thing this bios should do is to enter protected mode and do a "FAR
JMP" to the RedBoot entry point. The sample "romboot" available does
nothing specific to your hardware but is a fair starting point. You don't
have to reinvent a bios but you need to have at least the SDRAM working,
the other things may be done in C at the beginning of RedBoot...

Jose Luiz

Madhu Lakshmanan wrote:

> Does Redboot for an x86 platform assume that chipsets
> like the Northbridge, Southbridge, etc., are
> initialized by a BIOS?
>
> Can I use the current / latest Redboot sources to
> create a Redboot for a generic x86 PC which _does not_
> have a BIOS?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Madhu Lakshmanan
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes
> http://autos.yahoo.com
>
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[ECOS] newbie questions

[bier meister]

Hi,

I am new to linux and eCos and i am trying to run a
"hello world!" application.

I am using SUSE 8.2 on an intel machine. My target
would be eventually the intel XScale(ARM).

I installed eCos and also compiled the gcc tools and
Insight.

I ran the ecos configuration tool and built the
libtarget.a (for the XScale platform)
I also built the tests.

Here is where i am stuck.

1. How can i run the tests if i do not have my HW so
far? (I ran one of the tests from Insight, but I got
only an empty main() function there).

1.a. When i run one of the tests on the simulator
using Insight, do I need to download also the
libtarget.a first?

2. How can I compile hello.c(found in the examples
directory) and run it on the simulator.

3. My libtarget.a is 8.5MB. Am I doing something wrong
here?

Thanks in advance.



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Re: [ECOS] newbie questions

[David Vrabel]

> 1. How can i run the tests if i do not have my HW so
> far?

If you don't have any target hardware and you just wish to become
familiar with eCos then I'd suggest using the Linux synthetic target.
This will produce binaries which will run (natively) on your Linux box.

See part XXV (eCos Synthetic Target) in the eCos reference manual.

http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/docs-latest/ref/hal-synth-arch.html

> 3. My libtarget.a is 8.5MB. Am I doing something wrong
> here?

Probably not.  I have one here that's 14 Mbyte.  Remember that it
contains loads of debugging and other information which will be stripped
from the final application.

David Vrabel
-- 
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Arcom                         Tel: +44 (0)1223 411200 ext. 3233
Clifton Road                  Fax: +44 (0)1223 403400
Cambridge CB1 7EA             E-mail: dvrabel@arcom.com
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Re: [ECOS] newbie questions

[Michael Anburaj]

Hi
>
>1. How can i run the tests if i do not have my HW so
>far? (I ran one of the tests from Insight, but I got
>only an empty main() function there).

From the Insight select the “Debug Target  Simulator”
Or Issue the following from the GDB console: target sim

>
>1.a. When i run one of the tests on the simulator
>using Insight, do I need to download also the
>libtarget.a first?

Nope. Just the ecos application elf image <hello for hello.c – on linux. Or 
hello.exe or hello.elf on Windows under cygwin>

>
>2. How can I compile hello.c(found in the examples
>directory) and run it on the simulator.

Check this,
http://geocities.com/michaelanburaj/ecos/ecos_smdk2410_examples.txt

>
>3. My libtarget.a is 8.5MB. Am I doing something wrong
>here?

No.

>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>
>
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[ECOS] newbie questions

[Andrew Voelkel]

1. In the configtool, what is the difference between save and export, and
what is the difference between load and import?

2. What is the difference between a .ecc file and a .ecm file?

I haven't found good answers to these questions in the docs.

- Andy


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Re: [ECOS] newbie questions

[Gary Thomas]

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 20:38 -0700, Andrew Voelkel wrote:
> 1. In the configtool, what is the difference between save and export, and
> what is the difference between load and import?
> 
> 2. What is the difference between a .ecc file and a .ecm file?
> 
> I haven't found good answers to these questions in the docs.

save/load work with .ecc files which are complete database snapshots.
export/import work with .ecm files which only show database entries 
which have been altered or implied (because of other settings)  They
are also typically orders of magnitude smaller.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
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MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
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Re: [ECOS] newbie questions

[Andrew Lunn]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 08:38:18PM -0700, Andrew Voelkel wrote:
> 
> 1. In the configtool, what is the difference between save and export, and
> what is the difference between load and import?
> 
> 2. What is the difference between a .ecc file and a .ecm file?

The configuration of an eCos system is saved in a .ecc file. This is
normally called ecos.ecc by ecosconfig, but the configtool can give it
other names. The save and load in the configtool operate on this file,
loading and saving the current configuration.

The ecos.ecc file is quite big, 1/2 MByte is typical since it contains
a lot of information. .ecm file contains the differences between the
current configuration and the default configuaration for a particular
template. This is much smaller than the .ecc file becasue you
typically only change a few configuration options. The export command
will generate such an .ecm file and import will apply the list of
changes to the current configuration.

        Andrew

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RE: [ECOS] newbie questions

[Andrew Voelkel]

Does that mean that a configuration carries around information inside itself
telling it what template it originated from, in order to calculate the
differences between it and that template?

- Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Lunn [mailto:andrew@lunn.ch] 
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 11:48 PM
To: Andrew Voelkel
Cc: ecos-discuss@sources.redhat.com
Subject: Re: [ECOS] newbie questions

On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 08:38:18PM -0700, Andrew Voelkel wrote:
> 
> 1. In the configtool, what is the difference between save and export, and
> what is the difference between load and import?
> 
> 2. What is the difference between a .ecc file and a .ecm file?

The configuration of an eCos system is saved in a .ecc file. This is
normally called ecos.ecc by ecosconfig, but the configtool can give it
other names. The save and load in the configtool operate on this file,
loading and saving the current configuration.

The ecos.ecc file is quite big, 1/2 MByte is typical since it contains
a lot of information. .ecm file contains the differences between the
current configuration and the default configuaration for a particular
template. This is much smaller than the .ecc file becasue you
typically only change a few configuration options. The export command
will generate such an .ecm file and import will apply the list of
changes to the current configuration.

        Andrew


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Re: [ECOS] newbie questions

[Andrew Lunn]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 09:09:34AM -0700, Andrew Voelkel wrote:
> 
> Does that mean that a configuration carries around information inside itself
> telling it what template it originated from, in order to calculate the
> differences between it and that template?

It is an ascii file, you can read it.... There is no human unreadbale
configuration files ala M$ Windoze.

cdl_configuration eCos {
    description "" ;

    # These fields should not be modified.
    hardware    linux ;
    template    net ;
    package -hardware CYGPKG_HAL_SYNTH current ;
    package -hardware CYGPKG_HAL_SYNTH_I386 current ;
    package -hardware CYGPKG_DEVS_FLASH_SYNTH current ;
    package -hardware CYGPKG_DEVS_ETH_ECOSYNTH current ;
    package -hardware CYGPKG_DEVS_WATCHDOG_SYNTH current ;

Here you can see the configuration was made using the net template.

        Andrew

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