DragonFly12 and LCD
A little LCD action...
I've been taking some time to play with study the Dragonfly12 microcontroller again. It's based on the Freescale MC9S12C32 chip... aka 68HCS12. The programming and architecture is actually coming along pretty easily for me. I've been using the 68HC11 for years and that's a huge advantage. In fact, I scratch built an EVB before Motorola even released them. I got ahold of a preliminary schematic from Dave Hyder, the Motorola rep around Seattlefor years.
One thing I'm finding is that there's just not a heck of a lot of folks out there publishing anything about it. There are a couple HCS12 chips available that are quite a bit more robust in the I/O department; the 9S12C32 chip I/O is fairly limited. But the price goes up proportionally! I got this DragonFly12 system for about $50... very affordable. I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner... the other more robust systems usually come with a Buffalo-type monitor called D-Bug12. The C32 only has the Motorola Serial Loader and is NOT verbose at all!
I ended up buying a BDM (Background Debugger Module) which makes life a lot easier for downloading, tracing programs, writing to flash memory, etc.
So anyway, I attacked an LCD with some code and got it going. There comes a point when flashing LEDs starts getting old! I'm going to use the on-chip A/D converter to read some kind of sensor and update the LCD live. Temperature is probably a good place to start...
I could do this stuff all the time... wait a minute... I guess I already do this stuff all the time!
I just bought the Dragonfly12 board and can't figure it out. Would it be alot easier if I just bought the DragonBDM?
Posted by: Brian | May 25, 2008 11:07:21 PM