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I’ve figured that the software needs to be finished first before even thinking of any real construction (all size constraints in my flat aside). So I’ve started up blender and gave it a shot:

Uhm, yes my desktop is that wide, isn’t yours?

Next on the todo-list is adding some wings (bah, who needs em anyway?) and implementing the FCS in Nasal.

SDCC is an opensource C-compiler for various small processors like the 16F628. After not working on the cockpit project for quit some time I managed to get hold of some spare time and motivation to continue the adventure of hardware “hacking”.

I stopped working on the project after the successful transmition of simple characters over a RS232 interface. It worked quit well for single characters but not for C-strings. It was just gibberish arriving on the hyperterminal (yeah, still programming my chips on windows).

Well last sunday I’ve taken a look at the generated assembler-code from SDCC and surprise, surprise I’ve stumbled over a compiler bug. Seem that the pic14 part of the SDCC has no active maintainer and that bug is not meant to be fixed in the near future. If KDbg hasn’t decided to crash on me after halting the program I may have taken a stab on fixing it. ;-P

I’ve got the serial-communication from a PIC16F628 to the PC to work! After spending hours if not days searching for a hardware-bug and blaming hyperterminal for not displaying anything at all, it turned out to be a PEBKAC-style issue. I’m still stuck on Windows to flash my PICs since the Elnec-PIKProg+ won’t (yet) run with any linux tool.

If the MCLR is turned on, and not set to high in your circuit, you won’t get the PIC to execute whats in his flash-memory ;-P. Well one down, many to go.

And now back to the english vocabulary, got a test tomorrow errr today…