Blogs

I’m currently looking at the new concurrency profiling tools that come with Visual Studio 2010. It’s interesting and useful stuff. The tools provide what I have attempted to develop in the past by using API Hooking but it’s vastly superior in speed and functionality. One of the big problems for me with my API Hooking concurrency tools (Deadlock detector and Lock Explorer) was that the instrumentation often caused the target process to run pretty slowly.

I’ve been playing with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .Net 4.0, building code, running tests, playing with the IDE, etc. The first issue that I’ve come across with my existing codebase is that the .Net 2.0 hosting APIs (such as CorBindToRuntimeEx)are now deprecated and there’s a whole new way of hosting the CLR. We’ve been quite successful in hosting the CLR from within our C++ servers, either to provide servers that support a mix of managed/unmanaged plugins as a pluggable high performance windows application server or to provide network protocol support in C++ (such as ENet) with ‘business logic’ being written in managed code.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. As I mentioned yesterday the servo controller project has got to the point where being able to unit test the code would be useful to me. In my day job as a C++ server developer I’ve been using unit tests for several years and most of the code that I write is written in a Test Driven Development style.

I’ve been having problems installing VS2010 Beta 2 onto a selection of x64 VMWare machines (fully updated and service packed XP and Windows 7). In fact I was having problems installing it onto any of them. The error that I was getting was this: [10/22/09,07:28:42] Microsoft Application Error Reporting: [2] CMsiComponent::Install() expects the setup file for Microsoft Application Error Reporting, but the file failed verification. And whilst a google showed that others were also getting the same error it was few and far between and nobody had been given any useful advice.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Way back at the beginning of this journey I mentioned the fact that I’d quite like to be able to use some of the development disciplines that I use in my day job during the development of the firmware for my hexapod.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. I’m in the process of integrating the stand alone code that implements my ‘multi-servo move’ command and the rest of the controller. It’s harder than it should be, probably because I’m not experienced enough yet with assembly language not to have made some school boy errors.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. The work on turning my excel spreadsheet into AVR assembler code which can move multiple servos to arrive at their target locations at the same time is proceeding well. I have the required code operating in a stand alone environment in the simulator and all I need to do now is merge that in with the rest of the code… Once that’s done my servo controller is complete and whilst I already know that there are at least two further versions in the pipeline I expect I’ll move onto something more before working on them.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. The final command for my serial servo controller is the most complex. The idea behind it is that with a hexapod leg you will want to be able to move the leg to a new position where the new position requires all three of the servos that manage the leg to move to potentially new locations.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Work on the latest version of the serial servo controller is going well. I’d accumulated a pile of random nice to have ideas, some of which then necessitated some other ideas, and then there was the one must have command (the one which moves several servos to new positions over time and ensures that they all arrive at their final resting places at the same time).

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Having discussed my serial communication issues on AVRFreaks I’ve decided that I need a new design for the servo controller. My current design is very successful in doing what I set out to do, which was to give priority to the PWM generation aspect of the code.