An Overview
|
Most embedded systems provide little visual or audible feedback to the
user or system designer. Of course, this is not critical in systems that
require no user feedback such as in most control systems. However, this is a
problem for an embedded systems designer. One major setback for a designer is
the lack of visual feedback during system debugging. Designers are forced to
devise ad-hoc debugging methods that vary from design to design. These
debugging methods could be portable across designs but due to their lack of
standardization a designer has to reinvent his/her debugging algorithm for
every new design. To facilitate debugging and visual feedback during design,
we reverse engineered an led matrix display board and packaged it as an FPBO
module. Essentially, this module can be integrated in different applications
effortlessly as part of the Echidna framework. The designer can plug in the
module and use it without having to worry about interfacing his design to the
module. The module is used as a display board that displays text, numbers and
arbitrary bitmap patterns.
|
