A long planned modification of the source file structure of the MSCB subsystem has been implemented. This is however only for those people who do actively participate in micro controller programming with MSCB. The idea behind this is tha the central include file mscbemb.h had a section for each new project. So whenever a new project was added, this file had to be modified which is clumsy and hard to maintain. Therefore I took the project specific sections out of this file and put it into a config.h file, which is separate for each project (very similar to VxWorks). So the folder tree now looks like this:
midas\mscb\embedded
\include <- place for framework include file mscbemb.h
\lib <- precompiled TCP/IP library for SCS-260 submaster
\src <- framework sources mscbmain.c and mscbutil.c
\<project1> <- separate folder for project1
config.h <- config file for project1
\<project2> <- separate folder for project2
config.h <- config file for project2
...
\experiment
\<experiment1>
\<experiment2>
So each project has it's own config.h, which is included from the central mscbemb.h and can be used to enable certain features of the framework without having to change the framework itself. The "projectx" folders contain devices which are used across several experiments and sometimes also between institutes (PSI and TRIUMF). If you make a device which is only used in a specific experiment, this should go under \experiment with the name of the device or the experiment as a subdirectory. I encourage everybody to submit even specific projects to the subversion system since they can sometimes be useful for others to look at some example code.
A few other things have to be changed in order to adapt to the new structure:
- The framework files mscbmain.c mscbutil.c and mscbemb.h have moved and therefore they have to be re-added to the projects in the Keil MicroVision Development Environment.
- The name of the device should not be defined under compiler settings (Project Options/C51/Preprocessor Symbols), but put directly into the config.h file associated with the project.
- The include paths in the compile have to be changed and point to \midas\mscb\embedded\include
- The file config.h has to be copied from a similar project and adjusted to fit the new project.
I did remove all project specific sections from mscbemb.h in the current SVN version, so certain projects (FDB_008 at TRIUMF, CRATE_MONITOR and PT100X8 at PSI) have to retrieve the settings (like LED ports etc.) from the old mscbemb.h and put it into the config.h file.
Furthermore there is a new STARTUP_VDDMON.A51 file in the src directory which should be added to each project. This was recommended by the micro controller manufacturer and fixes cases where the EEPROM contents of the CPU gets lost from time to time during power up.
The last thing is that PSI switched to MicroVision 4 as the development environment, so I added new project files (*.uvproj and *.uvopt instead *.Uv2), but I left the old ones there in case someone still has the uV2 environment. They are however not maintained any more.
If there is any problem with the new structure or you have some comments, please don't hesitate to contact me.
- Stefan |