I have been fiddling a bit more with my Renesas H8 Starter Kit, and am liking the H8 more and more. I really like the way the High Performance Embedded Workshop does things. It generates a lot of necessary stuff to make programming easier, including an iodefine.h file that provides easy bit and byteaccess to all the H8 registers.
My main interest right now is to see if I can get some I2C routines working on the starter kit. The H8/36077 chip on this starter kit really is a super set of the H8/3664F the Atom PRO is based on, so anything learned programming either of these in C/C++ should be applicable to the other.
I’ve written my own .h file which I hope will allow me to access the I/O pins of the H8/36077 by their pin names rather than having to use the longer names in the iodefine.h file. I hate typing anymore than I have to, and if my io.h file works out, I will only have to do it one time (to create io.h).
I have been thinking of ways to use this starter kit as a robot controller… The board has two 32 pin headers already. One idea I have is to get four more of these 32 pin headers and wire Vdd to one row and Vss to the other for each of the starter kit headers. This would provide the nice three pin headers we use for our robot projects. I’d use two of the new 32 pin headers for each header row on the starter kit.
Another idea I have is to use two 32 pin ribbon cables, which would have the single row pin compatible sockets on each end. This setup would make the starter kit board much better for general prototyping because the sockets would accept pins or jumper wires as required.
Sounds like a good idea to me . I have a similar thought on the Maveric 1B board that I have been playing with. They have something like 4 8 pin headers with a a pin blank between each 8 pin header on both the top and bottom of the board. I was thinking of trying to connect two 8 pin headers to some of these groups of pins, in order to make it easier to connect some of the different sensors. I was going to have the power pins connect up to the regulated +5v power, but I suppose on some of these 8 pin groups, I could try to connect these directly to a battery if I choose to have this board try to control some servos… Sorry I think I went a little off subject.
It seems this company is not interested in sales outside of the U.S. market. They wont send the starter kit here and although they said they would ship to me if I bought one, the support for it would be limited.
Not a very pro-active sales strategy that. I’ll stick with my Atmega’s I think. Cheaper and more powerful (and E.U. friendly).
Well, you have to understand that these companies give free samples in hopes that they will sell thousands, should a designer decide to use it in their next circuit design. That’s the strategy behind it anyway. I guess it really depends on who is handling the handouts. I doubt they are quick to give it to just any Joe who asks. It’s more likely Eddie or myself could probably get a sample if we used our work address and email, since we both work in the electronics industry.
I got my starter kit without any problems and just used my normal personal domain e-mail address. I just wish there were some other boards available that use the H8 chips, because they are nice and I am liking them better the more I learn about them. I’ve sure spent plenty of time reading the hardware manuals.
The other nice thing about this, is most of what you learn using the starter kit can be applied to programming the Atom PRO in C also. I am starting to dabble with C and the Atom PRO.
It’s good that you were able to get one sent to you. It depends on the person handling the request. Some people hand out stuff no questions asked and some do not. There are other factors that can play a role such as HOW you ask for the sample among some other variables.
It never hurts to ask, you have nothing to loose and everything to gain.
I am just getting a bit more into the H8 now and have been going through the example source code (learn quite a lot that way). The starter kit board has some LEDs on it that can be used as output devices, so I am going to try coding up a simple program to use them to “say hello” so to speak.
This will also be a good way to see if my io.h file allows me to do things the way I would like to. I also just received my latest LM order, and have some cables that might allow me to connect to whichever I/O pins on the starter kit I want to use. I would use this to bring the hardware I2C or other I/O pins out to my breadboard.
I will post more when I know if all this works or not.
This is what I have, and I have also registered to hopefully get an H8SX starter kit. I believe the H8SX is currently the big gun of the H8 family, with much more speed, more features, and up to 512K of flash for program storage.
