BasicMicro - Forums

and a convert!

I posted in the PRO forum, the other day, that I had just discovered BasicMicro and hoped that the "PRO" was the solution I needed for reading GPS NMEA sentences and analog signals from a radar altimeter, parsing the NMEA strings and performing some floating point math on the altimeter data, then logging specific information on demand.

Allan, suggested that the BasicAtom might be a better place to begin. So, that's what I did and I'm happy to report that my flight data logger is up and running!

There were a few anomolies that I'm still scratching my head over - like having to shift in 13-bits, instead of 12, from an LTC1298 - but basically it was a pretty easy transition. The external interrupts worked from the gitgo. They even seem to trigger while serin is waiting for the GPS string. Can that be?

Anyway, this is such an improvement. I had been using a BS2P to read and parse the GPS sentences and send the info over to a Domino, which was doing the ADC and floating point math, then sending the data out when it received an external interrupt.

Thanks, Allan and all you other contributors whose tips I read while waiting for the Atoms to arrive.

- Don

Excellent, I'm glad it works for you.

If you're using HSERIN to read the GPS string, then yes other things can happen while it's being recieved. Otherwise, "MBasic Interrupts" really only occur between MBasic Keywords. As far as I know, anyway. It could be your SERIN is timing out on one GPS message, you get the interrupt, then your SERIN gets the next message.


I had the same experience when first using the Atom. After the BS2, the 8,000 bytes of Flash and 390 bytes (yay!) of memory were like fresh air. The 30,000 Instructions Per Second instead of 2000, AND being able to use the 'native' timers, was also very nice.

And I still LOVE the Atom debugger.