Part 2: An MCU-resident rapid prototyping and education environment for the Freescale Badge Board

This is a 3-part series.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSgha8qjB3E
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOhN_rzwi80
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLat-YqMUV4

StickOS is an MCU-resident rapid prototyping and education environment for highly integrated MCUs. It makes the internal MCU functionality trivially available to a large class of users who don't otherwise want to become MCU experts. Literally in minutes, hobbyists, researchers, and students can have useful embedded systems up and running, taking advantage of all of the MCU integrated peripheral functionality, as well as Zigbee wireless functionality, without ever understanding traditional MCU I/O registers or software development environments.

StickOS is flashed onto the MCU once, and from then on the user can control the MCU thru a USB, Ethernet, or Zigbee interface using just a terminal emulator. Internal to the MCU is an entire resident StickOS BASIC programming environment (including an easy-to-use editor, compiler, flasher, and debugger), where external pins are mapped to special "pin variables" for manipulation or examination, and internal peripherals are managed by BASIC control statements and interrupt handlers.

When coupled with an MC1320x Zigbee wireless transport, the MCU may be remotely controlled through another MCU, via a telnet/rlogin-like interface, eliminating the need for a direct USB or Ethernet connection to the host computer. Additionally, BASIC programs can access variables remotely from other MCUs, enabling the use of "remote pin variables" or other forms of inter-MCU communication.

StickOS binaries, sample applications (including wireless ones), as well as full documentation and a skeleton source code project for easily porting finished BASIC programs to C, are available from http://www.cpustick.com

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• embedded system
• mcu
• zigbee
• stickos
• cpustick
• freescale
• microchip
• badge board