Download ERIKA Enterprise and RT-Druid for Microchip dsPIC (R) DSC!

Introduction

Embedded microcontroller units are spreading in thousands of applications, ranging from single to distributed systems, control applications, multimedia, communication, medical applications and many others. Modern microcontrollers, which are growing in computational power, speed and interfacing capabilities, are more and more feeling the need of tools to make the development of complex scalable applications easier.

The dsPIC (R) DSC family represents the latest product of Microchip Technology Inc., the world leading company in the field of microcontroller units. With a speed of up to 40 MHz, the dsPIC (R) DSC family seamlessly integrates a DSP core for high performance computation with a full range of interfaces to several buses like CAN, I2C, SPI, serial lines, ecc.

Erika Enterprise and RT-Druid for Microchip dsPIC (R) DSC

Embedded applications often require tight control on the temporal behavior of each single activity in the system. The research in the field of real-time systems brought the team of Evidence Srl to design a small, efficient, modular real-time kernel that can be used to easily guarantee real-time constraints in every embedded applications.

Erika Enterprise and RT-Druid represent the answer of Evidence Srl for the development of scalable real-time applications for the Microchip dsPIC (R) DSC family.

The main features of ERIKA Enterprise and RT-Druid which are specific for Microchip dsPIC (R) DSC are the following:

• Installation setup which integrates Microchip software together with fully configured Evidence Erika Enterprise + RT-Druid;
• Full support for the Microchip devices libraries;
• Full support for the Microchip C30 compiler;
• Full support of the MPLAB IDE debugging environment;
• Full support for the Microchip ICD2 debugger;
• Full support for dsPIC (R) DSC series 30 and 33, and PIC24

• Support for the 802.15.4 (ZigBee) wireless communication protocol (using Maxstream XBee, Microchip ZigBee coming soon);
• Support for I/O to Multimedia Card (MMC) / Secure Digital with FAT filesystem (coming soon);
• Development of many specific hardware drivers for dsPIC (R) DSC, like multiple servomotor driving, bus EIB support (domotic), and many other (coming soon);
  
• Support for the FLEX development board (see here for details);

Integration with Microchip Inc. products 

Erika Enterpise and RT-Druid aims to the best integration with the existing tools for development available from Microchip Inc. 

RT-Druid will be used to quickly configure the application, setting temporal parameters of real-time tasks, memory requirements, stack allocation and many other parameters. RT-Druid generates the application template, and leaves the developer the task to implement the logic of each single task.

While programming the application, the developer can exploit the power and flexibility offered by  the primitives of the Erika Enterprise real-time kernel.

The application can be imported into MPLAB IDE to be written into the dsPIC (R) DSC EPROM flash memory. Moreover, the application can be debugged from within the MPLAB IDE.