Netburner Dev Kit

The Netburner dev kit arrived today and after some software installation (it actually quizes you to see if you remember the license agreement.!.) and a com port configuration I compiled and downloaded my first test app.

It's good to be working in C again...semicolons are back!!!!

The MOD5213 has a boot monitor that can be accessed at start up. A terminal program (one is included in the dev kit.) connected to UART0 on the dev board is used to access the monitor. There is a delay (5 sec is the default) during which sending an 'A' (<- note it's case sensitive) will start the monitor. Allowing the timeout to expire will start your code which means you have to wait for the monitor to timeout out before your code will run. Luckily, it's easy to lower the time out. You do this under 'Setup' ( <- note the menu isn't case sensitive). I set mine to 3 seconds. If this starts to seems too long I need to cut back on the caffeine...

The dev board offers a few things to play with strait away. There are four leds and a putleds() function that sets the leds to the last four bits of its int parameter. It's nice since I got the mandatory led flasher test app working without even knowing which pins the leds are connected to.

That's a good sign, since one of the decision criteria for the new board was a good support lib. Just by starting a new project all the required include files for the RTOS, serial output (interrupt driven), etc. was created by the IDE. The putsleds() function is in a header called utils that is not added to the project by default. Having all that stuff working out of the gate is huge... Networking in a day... I get it!

Now let's try out the I2C real-time clock to see if using the i2c bus is just as easy...