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Authored by: Ian Al on Thursday, June 13 2013 @ 12:15 PM EDT |
Even the Arduino has two sets of software (at least for the UNO) since the
smaller of the two CPUs has the USB driver installed and acts as an In System
Programmer for the main ATMEL processor.
The main processor comes with the autoboot software that checks for an installed
program and, if it finds one, runs it. It also checks initially for programming
requests sent via the USB interface processor.
There are two ISP interfaces so that the USB processor can be programmed for,
say, a keyboard or a MIDI interface and the main processor can be programmed
without the boot program by installing the program at the program counter start
address.
That USB interface can be used for interaction with the running program to
control the main processor. Python works in this way with the Python being in
the external computer and controlling the Arduino via the USB interface.
The Arduino has, in fact, already been transformed into two new machines by the
pre-installed software! Fabulous.
The Raspberry Pi would seem to have no software installed since its only system
memory is an SD card which is not supplied with the computer.
However, it also has pre-installed auto-boot software to look for bootable files
in any inserted SD card. Again, it also has an ISP interface, this time the
usual ARM JTAG interface. There is no way I'm trying out my JTAG programmer on
it, though!
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Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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