I found a cool tool yesterday thanks to the Circuit Cellar magazine. It is called PortMon and monitors the serial port without needing any wires. This is such a cool debugging tool, and has the potential to save me so many hours of heartache.

The only issue is that the software is no longer being developed. Still it is a good piece of software and it will cetainly be in my bag of tricks to be used in the future.

Rabbit Season

Right now it is Rabbit Season. I am working on an embedded controller from a company called Rabbit Semiconductor. It has been some time since I have worked on the rabbit, and it is slowly coming back to me. Some of the strange ways that things are done. My first serious Rabbit project was the Hollywood Scooter job.

The Rabbit is derived from a 30 year old processor, but they have added new features and this device is actually quite fast and powerful. It is certainly powerful enough for what I want to do with it. And if not, I upgrade to a faster one. This processor is only running at about 20 MHz, which is fast enough for most embedded applications. This saves battery power, and you dont need to worry about heat dissipation or fans either.

My poor Dell laptop refuses to talk to the device through the serial port – so I need to get a Rabbit ‘Approved’ serial converter to program the device. So right now I am programming it using another older laptop. But since I want to keep only one PC on my desktop I am using VNC to control the other PC about a meter and a half away.

Anyway I would write more but it is breakfast time, and I am hungry.

Music:

I found a gem – Eurogliders with “Cold Comfort”. This could almost be a christmas song as it talks about Israel. I am more interested in it musically. Right now I have Billy Joel playing on Random Play.