[Elecraft] Re: PIC Development for Elecraft Question

[Wayne Burdick]

Hi Glen,

Glen Torr wrote:

> I was interested to know, but I appreciate it may be commercial in
> confidence, if a real-time kernel of some kind is used in the various PIC's
> in Elecraft radios?

No. The firmware is 100% custom. All the PICs use an executive loop. The main
MCU in each radio has about 10 concurrent state machines for periperal update
and T-R sequencing, plus dozens of interrupt-timed events.

The coprocessors (on options) use the main MCU as if it were a miniature
X-server: front panel events place a switch code on the auxBus, the targeted
coprocessor fields it, then it returns a text string to be displayed on the LCD.
This has the advantage of allowing us to change coprocessor features without
modifying the main MCU code, at least in some cases.


> I have the KX1 which is a beautiful radio and the control firmware is
> exemplary. I do some PIC development at work and although I used to use
> assembler I now use HiTech C.

We use the CCS and Microchip compilers for most of our firmware development.


> Thank you for a great radio...

Our pleasure!

73,
Wayne
N6KR


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