Good presentation, important to be aware of and understand the underlying architecture and concepts and to be thankful for high level languages and Real Time Operating Systems.
Nice discussion of the Cortex M0 ISA- I wondered how ARM was going to reduce the gate count of the M0, and slide 3 in today's presentation illustrates that. Nice way to show how the instruction set (and the resultant instruction decoder) was truncated.
@lowell_seida - I did not find any similarity in the syntax between PL/I and C, only that they are both high level languages. agree with your I/O assessment.
C is a stripped-down version of PL/I. I/O and function libraries standard in PL/I have to be imported (included) into C programs. Pointers are very confusing.
I feel I am one who successfully transitioned from assembly to C some years ago. It is hard to judge how hard it is for others, as I have worked with those who were successful and others who seem like they will never make it. I feel is one has experience any any high level language, the transition is some easier. Also, ones mind set on how much they want to learn C. There are those who only want to know enough C to argue against its purpose.
I'm not sure I can really answer that. I also had programming experience in FORTRAN, BASIC, and Pascal before I learned C. Once you know a couple of high level languages learning another is not so difficult. When I was switching back and forth doing C on PCs and assembly on embedded micros I had to get into a different mind set. C certainly is a lot more productive. Used to be hardware was expensive and programmers cheap. Now it is the other way around.
Used to do all SW in assembly but now almost exclusively C. I always felt it helps to know what is happening under the hood, although most of the time you can ignore it in C programming. Sometimes you do have to dig in deep. Most intros to new micros skip the low level stuff. It was good to see it here.
Thanks Paul - good overview. Most people will never need to go to the assembly level unles they have a really special case but it is a good tool to use to understand the processor.
Personally, I look at the assembly to figure out how intelligent the compiler is being at optimizing things.
I wonder if "Tail Chaining/Late Ariving" means a technique I used long time ago to exit interrupt to allow other interrupts to arrive, but still not giving the operation to the main thread and executing the slow stuff...
Real Time -- Low latency -- yes -- Interrupt driven data collection from accelerometers etc for real time frequency and vibration analysis. Simple stuff though -- niot that complicated.
@Chuck: have not used Cortex-M0 before and so have not yet used these specific instructions. However, similar instructions are available for most architectures.
Sounds like Paul is teaching CS101 using the Cortex-M0 for illustration, rather than an introduction to the Cortex-M0 for experienced practitioners familiar with other devices. Covering the basics is good. This is just an unexpected set of basics, at least to me.
The REVs may be used for portability purposes if LE and BE modes are avaialble in a standard fashion somewher in the hardware or software. Is it a good assessment?
Slide 3 would be improved if the M0 instruction subset was colored differently within the M3 instruction set itself, rather than in a separate nested box with duplicate instructions.
@danlafleur When was the conversion? There's a lot of people against it here even though it's easier. Binary volume measurements ... 2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart and so on.
@Kentj, yes close enough. There's a little trick to finding out how old you are, based on when we went metric in Canada. Have someone tell you the temperature and it will most likely be in C, then ask how much they weigh or how tall, usually in pounds and feet/inches if they were old enopugh before the conversion.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
Andrew Morris designed a circuit that could detect a stroke victim's groan and convert the sound into a signal so caregivers would know when help was needed.
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