The PC used to allow control of electronic hardware by interfacing
through its I/O ports and operating system that allowed
deterministic real-time control. The PC grew progressively more
complex and powerful at doing GUI, multitasking, 3D graphics,
virtual memory management, and much more. But it also became
extremely convoluted to program while also prohibiting any access
to low-level I/O systems. In the meantime, microcontrollers were
becoming more powerful, easier to program and cheaper. Naturally,
engineers and hobbyists are opting to use them for their projects
instead of the PC. However, most microcontrollerss lack the data
storage and processing power as well as the user interfacing
facilities of the PC and many find themselves wishing to combine
the two. This book aims to show techniques and strategies that can
be implemented with any microcontroller and any PC programming
language to create a protocol for interfacing and combining the two
where the shortcomings of each are overcome by the capabilities of
the other. We illustrate the principles with Parallax's multi-cored
Propeller - a single chip with eight 32-bit processors running in
parallel and sharing a common RAM. With its powerful programming
language (Spin) it facilitates implementing multitasking and
parallel processing, which are at the core of the book's outlined
techniques. RobotBASIC is used as the PC programming language
(interpreter/compiler) for its powerful readily usable tools that
enable a programmer of any expertise to create GUI programs and to
effect hardware communications that would need a high level of
programming proficiency in other languages. To illustrate the
strategies with concrete examples we create a few interesting
projects using quite a variety of hardware (motors and sensors)
that are typical of most devices you are likely to require in an
electronics project (e.g. Robots).
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