| ??? 01/17/08 17:52 Read: times |
#149660 - maybe not so much ... Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Craig Steiner said:
Erik Malund said:
I am a firm believer that all 'education' should be state of the art (leading edge, not bleeding edge) even a hobbyist will be better off. I agree with that in theory. My hesitation is that if newbies use state of the art, there is a lot of "under the hood" architecture issues that won't make as much sense as if you know the state of the art technology got where it is. It's easy to not learn the first thing about the address bus, the address latch, etc. if you have a state-of-the-art processor that has everything on-chip. I have to agree with Erik, in that his notion of state-of-the-art, in his case SiLabs, hardware provides a useful feature that is difficult to reproduce otherwise. I don't know how extensive the debugging support for the SiLabs chips, via their JTAG interface is, i.e. I don't know how good the trace feature is, and how is displayed to the end-user. However, if it gives the ability to capture, in real time, the events that occur around the MCU, and display them to the user, it's pretty useful. If not, well, that monitor that I've been using (Ultramon51) is pretty good, particularly in that it has a built-in assembler and disassembler, which allows "quick and dirty" code mod's, etc. and, above all, because it focuses on the MCU and not on PC-based HLL compilers, which, IMHO confuse the hell out of new learners with respect to what they're doing, completely distorting the process and totally disturbing their focus on the 805x architecture. At this point, a person could buy a SiLabs kit and use a 'C' compiler and write some code knowing precious little about how it works. I'm hoping my book produces more knowledgeable developers rather than just code monkeys that can write code but have no idea how it works or whether or not it is efficient. I fear that basing everything on state-of-the-art processors might hide too much of the inner workings that separates a code money from a knowledgeable 8052 developer. Remember that I'm talking about a book that tries to teach these concepts. I'm not arguing what is better for the professional or experienced developer. I'm wondering which approach is most instructive for learning. That's the reason I went with the much less complete Atmel parts as opposed to something more state-of-the-art. It's not state-of-the-art, but I think it's probable that a newbie will gain a wider breadth of knowledge from the traditional hardware than the new stuff. And while ICE is great, I think you ultimately learn more by banging your head trying to figure out what's going wrong by having to think about your code and trying to consider where it could be failing rather than just stepping through it until your program happens to do something you weren't expecting. Regards, Craig Steiner You can put LED's and LCD's on a board, but it won't, IMHO, have the impact of a display of the signals as they're generated, and a simulation of the LED presented by PC-based software would probably be quite a bit easier to deal with (the end-user can't break it) than physical hardware. That way, the end-user can get away from the problems, as were recently discussed, of gettting a compatible LCD, and other issues of that ilk, and focus on what the 805x code and 805x core are doing. RE |
