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 was looking for information to help me decide which servos to buy for the legs; wondering about torque and cost and whatever when I followed a link to the Lynxmotion site and came across the documentation for their SSC 32 servo controller.

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. Some of the new commands that I have planned for the servo controller will require that I load and save persistent settings from the ATMega’s eeprom. Having spent a little time looking at the example code in the datasheets it seems that you have to disable interrupts to safely read and write the eeprom.

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. This is the source code for the latest version of the 64 channel servo controller as detailed here. This is an ATMega168 version of the controller that was originally developed for the ATtiny2313 but which was ported to the ATMega when I ran out of memory on the ATtiny.

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 new 64 channel ATMega168 serial servo controller accepts the following commands. All successful commands are echoed back. Parameters are validated and errors are indicated with an error response of [0xFF] [badParamIndex] [Command echo] where badParamIndex is a 1 based index of the parameters in the command and indicates which parameter failed validation.

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. Due to work pressure and then holidays and then more work pressure I had to take a break from the servo controller for a couple of weeks. Most of the code changes that I had previously been discussing have been implemented and I’m now in the process of testing an ATMega168 version of the 64 channel servo controller complete with new style commands!

There are some interesting blog posts by Rick Vicik over on the Windows Server Performance Team Blog. Most interesting for me is part three of the three part series on “Designing Applications for High Performance”. Whilst parts one and two cover some useful ideas they’re pretty general. Part three really digs into the implementation of I/O completion ports and how new API calls can help improve performance and reduce locking within the APIs themselves.

Has anyone got anything to say about the relative merits of Parasoft Insure++ vs the BoundsChecker parts of the Microfocus DevPartner Studio product? I’ve used BoundsChecker for a long time, and it has plenty of faults but the fact that all support channels seem to have vanished during the transition of the product from Compuware to MicroFocus means that I’m now considering moving to something else. So far my impression of Insure++ isn’t being helped by the fact that the sales person seems to require a ’land line’ to contact me on to enable them to talk to me about how I might get something to evaluate (oh good, “enterprise” marketing) and no, my mobile number isn’t any use to them even though they’re supposed to be based in the same country as I am.

The release notes for the 6.1 release, whilst complete, don’t really highlight the key points of this release. These are as follows: Support for SSPI Negotiate (NTLM and Kerberos) servers and clients - You can now license code which allows you to implement high performance IO Completion based asynchronous servers and clients that support “Windows Authentication” for authentication and security of data transfer. Example clients and servers are available here

The latest release of The Server Framework is now available. This release includes the following changes. The following changes were made to the libraries. Admin Library - 6.1 We now suppress warning 4370, ’layout of class has changed from a previous version of the compiler due to better packing’, in Warnings.h. New build configuration options. All of these are enabled by defining the option to 1 in Config.h and disabled by defining them to 0; the default state if you do not do anything in Config.

I upgraded one of my build machines to Windows 7 almost a month ago now but I only managed to get around to doing my main developer machine at the start of this week. Apart from the fact that the Windows 7 in place upgrade failed on me, twice, and rolled back to Vista without leaving me with much information as to why it had failed (removing Compuware’s DevPartner Studio did the trick), the upgrade went pretty smoothly.