Memtest+

[Peter Stuge]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 04:58:57PM -0500, Dave Aubin wrote:
>   Has no one else hit this?  One idea I have being a PIC lover is
> To use some LED's on the mother board and make a serial protocol 
> Over the LED's, much like a software UART for a PIC.
>   Anyone have an input on this? 

That will work just fine, but watch out for running the "GPIO serial
bus" too fast for the PIC.

(With GPIO I'm referring to pins driving the LEDs on the target system,
not a PIC GPIO port.)

If simplex is fun enough, you could use a single GPIO pin and connect
that to RX on the PIC, connect TX on the PIC to a MAX232 and plug
that into a regular serial port on a PC running a terminal emulator.
All the PIC has to do then is read from RCREG and send everything
back out through TXREG. Any PIC with a USART in async mode should do
for this.

For duplex (etherboot/filo menu) you may need a separate GPIO pin for
flow control, the usual serial start/stop bit handshake may not be
very reliable without a hardware UART on the target system. The easy
solution is to use a synchronous serial interface instead; add a
clock signal driven by the target. This also overcomes any problems
caused by the PIC baud rate generator being controllable only with
relatively low precision.

The 16F87x series have both an MSSP and a USART; the MSSP could be
used in SPI Slave mode for duplex communication with the target
system, and the USART for talking to the PC running the terminal
emulator. One thing to keep in mind is that SPI always transmits data
in both directions, this means that the serial port wont be 8-bit
clean unless you make a small protocol to indicate when data actually
is available, this wastes twice the bandwidth, but may still be good
enough.

A USB device with a 16C745 or possibly 18F2550 if they can be sourced
is tempting, but that also requires writing some kind of driver for
the USB device, or figuring out how an existing USB<->serial adapter
works and reimplementing that. Too much work. Plus the 16C7x5 only do
low-speed USB.

Hope it works out though!


//Peter