I'm wondering if anybody here has tried this 'Great Cow BASIC' ? - a *free* BASIC compiler for PIC and AVR Odd name, but might be nice for those who like to program in BASIC and find C not so nice to read/write. I haven't tried it, but perhaps somebody here has?
From the site - Great Cow BASIC is a BASIC compiler for PIC and AVR microcontrollers. It lets you to program in BASIC instead of having to learn assembly. It's also completely free!
Great Cow BASIC has been written with three main aims - to remove the need for repetitive assembly commands, to produce efficient code, and to make it easy to take code written for one chip and run it on another. It hides many of the more confusing parts of microcontroller programming, making it suitable for beginners and those who don't like assembly.
The syntax of Great Cow BASIC is based on that of QBASIC/FreeBASIC, but with some alterations to suit the vastly different system that it compiles for. Great Cow BASIC will allow you to program most 8 bit PIC microcontrollers (10F, 12C, 12F, 16C, 16F, 18C and 18F chips), and also includes near-complete support for most AVR microcontrollers (Classic AVR, Tiny AVR and Mega AVR).
They also have a graphical version, where non-programmer types can apparently program in a flowchart like environment - good for raw beginners I expect, though no doubt too limiting if you're doing anything serious.
How do you make a slot for a pad instead of a hole? I'm looking at fitting a 2.1mm DC barrel socket and would rather slots for the pins rather than the common trick of using a 3mm+ hole and filling it with solder. Can the slots just be drawn on a mechanical layer and a note added for the Fab or is there another way of doing it? In altium the pad shape can be changed easily, but I can't see any way to turn the hole within a pad into a slot, so maybe somebody here can help?
Might sound a bit odd, but I'm wondering if anybody has ever seen a project that would interface a USB Wireless keyboard for use on a legacy AT machine with only a normal AT keyboard port? These days PS2 keyboards are getting harder to get and certainly wireless keyboards in PS2 or AT types seem to be non existent, so for those that still have legacy machines for special uses, this would be a really handy interface.
The cheap USB-PS2 style adaptors don't work by the way, they are just wired-through, with no actual interface circuitry to convert the signals, etc.
[The spam got canned, but I couldn't resist, I was laughing so much at the 'Crushed limestone' post and Brent using his BusPirate to communicate with it ]
... Yes Brent, and you can do that whilst doing your hair, ultimately causing a trendy situation! Oh, I assume that's after you get out of your polarizing bed-sheets. And if you have mineral water or crushed limestone in your prescribed drinking glasses, it is able to heighten all the undesirable negative effects of Ultra violet irradiation! - Who would have thought?
I'll have to be more careful the next time I have a nice cold (prescribed) glass of crushed limestone.
Hey Brent, what comms protocol does crushed limestone work with anyway?
