(Cross posting to comp.arch.embedded - somebody may find this useful
there.) (Sorry! 1st reply went to "com.arch...")
Don Taylor wrote:
Congratulations! Sounds like a good idea.
A variation that is perfectly suited to 8 bit micros with a 16 bit
address bus is this: feed the high and low byte of the address bus to
two D/A converters, use the analog outputs to drive the X/Y inputs of
an oscilloscope. It is amazing how much information you can collect
about what your code is doing by just looking at the resulting
display. For example, an unlit spot in an area you know belongs to
your data ram is data that is not being accessed, the relative
intensity of the traces tells you where you are spending most of the
time, etc.
Nah, that is too fancy. Just put a small AM radio next to your gear.
Again, amazingly useful. (Not always, I concede.). After finding the
right spot on the dial we may learn that "chirp" means a particular
ISR is being called, that "buzz" comes form that function and so on.
I would be interested. I would like to build (just for fun) an FPGA
base computer. Every time I sit to make a few sketches the
architecture changes, but the toggle switches and blinkenlights are
always there.
Roberto Waltman
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