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Amicus18 review

Former Member

This is reposted from the original road test page...

 

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Mine arrived yesterday. I haven't had  chance to do anything with it beyond unpacking it yet. I am hoping to  have a play over the weekend.

First impression is  the packaging at least is very 'hobbyist'. An inkjet printed cover sheet  wrapped around the board is all the documentation there was. The boards  themselves do look good quality though. There was an Amicus18 itself, a  prototyping companion shield and a set of stackable pin headers for  soldering to the shield. The shield is standard breadboard layout  designed for placing DIP devices along the center.

One  thing I hadn't realised before was that although there are three LEDs  on the board, none are under user control. One is power supply presence  and the other two are send/receive activity from the USB to serial  converter. Given that the two example programs in the hardware manual  are about blinking/PWMing LEDs, it would have been nice to have at least  one available on an I/O port out of the box.

Personally,  I would have loved to have seen a bank of LEDs on the board so that the  state of at least one full port can be immediately seen. This is meant  to be a prototyping/development board and I've found that a stack of  LEDs can be of one the most useful debugging tools available. Plus  flashing lights look cool image.

 

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I tried to  have a play on Sunday. The software installed fine (although the Amicus  website is a little confusing as some bits talk about an IDE, some  about a compiler but it doesn't make it clear that the two are actually  the same thing).

 

I'm  not a great fan of 'thow shalt use our IDE' type products. And this one  really didn't get off to a good start with its colour scheme. I use a  none standard colour scheme (basically white text on a dark background  as I find it is much, much easier on the eyes than the Windows default  white background). Unfortunately, this means I can't read any of the  menus or toolbar text in the IDE because they use my Windows custom text  colour but the IDE's own choice of background colour - white on nearly  white. Also, the syntax highlighting has a limited range of colours  available (there is no custom RGB values option) and doesn't even allow  white let alone something unusual like orange.

 

I  haven't tried writing much code yet so I can't comment too much on how  good an editor the IDE is. Although it definitely has peculiarities  compared to my preferred editor. Not sure I would call it better or  worse than MPLAB's IDE yet. Need to try using it in anger first...

 

Moving  on to the compiler, again there are lots of peculiarities compared to  other languages I use. The last time I used BASIC was a BBC micro, but  even over and above the language itself, it gives the impression someone  deliberately set out to make the syntax as non C-like as possible!

 

More  curiously, it is also very tailored to specific hardware. That is, the  language itself has built in keywords for moving the cursor, drawing  pixels, etc. on two particular LCD controllers (one Samsung, one  Toshiba). There are also slightly more generic commands for using things  like RC5 and Sony remote control protocols. Plus PIC specific commands  for configuring PWM ports and such like. All of which should be very  useful and time saving (as long as you are using the appropriate  hardware).

 

The  real surprise was when I actually tried to plug the board in and try  out some of this funky compiler stuff. It was only then that I realised  the board has a USB host port not a device port. This means you need a  very unusual host to host cable. It seems there was one of these shipped with the board as part of the road test kit. Not sure if you get it as standard if you buy the Amicus18 retail. Alas, I put mine in the drawer when the kit arrived and completely forgot about it by the time I came to play with the board at the weekend! I will post more once I have reunited the cable with the board...

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  • Quick update. Installing the serial port driver on Windows 7 is a pain. It is not signed therefore you have to jump through quite a few hoops to get Windows to even notice that it exists. I had to go to the Device Manager, right click the broken entries and install from there. The standard 'new hardware wizard' refused point blank to do anything except talk to the Microsoft Update server! Note also that there are two devices that you need to install drivers for, one after the other. So if you think you've installed it fine but it still doesn't work, check to see if you have another new device with a broken driver in the Device Manager.

     

    After that polava, everything else was beautiful. I loaded up one of the example programs in the IDE, hit the 'compile and program' button, ran the serial port utility and there was the little Amicus saying 'Hello World' to me! I did the same with the ADC example and it immediately started spewing decimal sample values at me which happily went up and down with the old finger on the pin technique of highly accurate reference voltage generation. image  Pretty nifty for less than ten lines of code.

  • in reply to Former Member

    Thanks for that John,

     

    I'm interested to hear if this is a Windows7 problem or it exists in other OS. Sounds a real pain to figure out!

     

    Glad everything else went well, and laughed about the old finger trick. You plan to use it for a project, or mess around with it more?

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  • in reply to awinning

    Alistair,

    I'm running Vista, and had no problems installing the drivers.

     

    Unfortunately, due to the unique way that Windows is programmed; the "new hardware wizard" insists on scanning the whole Microsoft database and every other thing you didn't ask it to do, before allowing me to select the driver location.

     

    But once Windows has made it's fuss, the driver installs - no problem. Sorry, rant over image

  • in reply to awinning

    I've not used Vista but WinXP would give you a dialogue along the lines  of 'do you want to search online or use a local driver'. It sounds like Vista still has it but only after the auto-search. Whereas with Windows7 this seems to have been removed entirely from the 'wizard'. Presumably  on the grounds that it is far too complicated and worrying a question to  ask a user. So many things in 7 are broken or missing compared to XP  (not that XP was ever perfect). It has been dumbed down to the point of  being almost unusable by anyone who isn't an idiot image. Grrrr! Anyway, enough ranting...

     

    What I would like to do is try converting an existing project to use the Amicus. It involves a set of LEDs running from a rather complex 16 channel driver, a solid state relay for switching a mains supply and an IR remote  control receiver/repeater (possibly with send via ethernet given the  tempting looking ethernet shield that is/will be available). It is  currently half written in straight assembler using a fairly similar PIC  on a chunk of breadboard. So it should be a good test of what the Amicus  can do and how easy it is to do it. Although I'm not sure when I'll get sufficient time to attack it. Life is looking busy for the next two weeks or so.