The Information Zone

These brief tutorials are designed to help engineers rapidly become acquainted with unfamiliar technologies and CPUs.  During our 40+ years in the game much of the engineering buzz of running COMSOL has come from developing an understanding of new products and their underlying technologies, so we would like to share our knowledge in the hope that it will be useful to you.

Communications

Some of the main changes in embedded engineering over the last decade have involved different mechanisms for communicating between Embedded CPUs and from them to PCs. As we have become involved with tools to work with these technologies we have produced a number of  advisory articles explaining the jargon and trying to clarify the important points from an Embedded engineering standpoint.  We hope you find them helpful.

TCP/IP for Embedded Engineers -----  This white paper describes how the TCP/IP protocol can be integrated into embedded systems from 8 bits to 32. It is designed to get engineers thinking about how this powerful family of protocols can be used to solve the communications problems of their applications and to add extra value to their products. 

"I found the white paper that I downloaded from your website to be the best and clearest introduction to TCP/IP that I have found so far. I am new to TCP/IP development and need to find a way to add TCP/IP to our current products.  M. S."
 

TCP mnemonics ---- Not exactly a tutorial but generally useful as it allow you to tell your ARP from your RARP without your brain going PING - Consult our list of TCP mnemonics.

CAN Tutorial  ---- Describes how CAN operates and what its advantages and limitations are with brief introductions to the networking systems built on a CAN base.

USB Tutorial  ---- Describes how USB operates and what you need to do to use it in your embedded application.

Development Techniques

Background information on microprocessor development techniques

On Chip Development and Flash Programming - BDM / JTAG/ SWD            

CPU Families

Why don't chip manufacturers summarise the facts about a CPU Family in the way that allows an Engineer to get an appreciation of the family in 10 minutes ?  Well probably because Marketing and Sales Departments get in the way.  We don't sell chips - in fact I have often said that there is not much we can sell you before you have chosen the chip to use for a project.  So the next best thing we can do is to help you on the way to that decision by supplying information in an easily digested marketing free format.

This is the first of a series of tutorials that attempted to summarise the features of each of a number of CPU families in a couple of pages/screens.

8051 Tutorial                 8085 Tutorial

If you find any errors in our tutorials please let us know .......... If you would like to try summarising your favourite (or as importantly least favourite) micro in under 2,000 words we would love to add it to our series.

The information provided in the web pages above has been produced in good faith but Computer Solutions Ltd does not warrantee that it is correct and accepts no liability associated with the use of that information....Caveat Emptor.