freemcan

Contents

• What is freemcan?
  • Why the name?
  • The Plan
• Building
  • Software Requirements
• Usage
• The License
• Hacking
  • Subdirectory Contents
• Ideas

What is freemcan?

(FIXME) freemcan is stuff.

Why the name?

• We wanted it to be Free Software.
• MCA is the acronym for Multi Channel Analyzer which is the common term for the device.
• "freemca" produced a few hits on Google. "freemcan" did not. Brand name collision wise, an unused word appeared to be the better choice.

The Plan

(FIXME) No plan.

Building

$ make

Installation is not supported at this time.

Software Requirements

• GNU make
• avr-gcc based AVR toolchain
• avr-binutils >= 2.19 (we use INSERT AFTER in linker scripts)
• POSIX/GNU/Linux/Unix host system
• gcc compiler for host system

For building the internal code documentation (mostly of interest to hackers), you additionally need

• doxygen
• graphviz

For creating the source lines of code (SLOC) summary, you additionally need

• sloccount

Usage

TBA.

The License

LGPLv2.1+

Hacking

Subdirectory Contents

firmware/

The device firmware for Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller

code-comparison/

Some common tasks our firmware needs written in portable C and compiled for all platforms we have a cross compiler for. This lets us compare the assembly language generated for those platforms.

hostware/

All the software running on the PC host. For lack of a better word, we called it "hostware" to distinguish it from the "firmware".

emulator/

Simple attempt at emulating the device connected to a device file by having an Erlang program connected to a Unix domain socket.

Ideas

• cbi/sbi do not modify SREG. That makes it easy to write an ISR without saving any registers, like e.g.:

  foo_vector:         /* ISR entry: 5 clock cycles */
            sbi foo,bar          /* 2 clock cycles */
            reti                 /* 5 clock cycles */
  

  for doing the reset timing stuff, potentially at ADC trigger, and after timer IRQ counted delay later, or similar stuff.