Having come to a bit of an impasse with the NEMA stepper motors vis a vis rotational rates as applied to Godzilla and figuring that Vik and Simon had more than enough on their plate trying to get the Mk II extruder rolling on Vik's reprap I decided to see if I could learn to program the 16F628 chip.
I was able to download and install the SDCC C compiler from SourceForge easily enough and confirm that the install was correct. Of course, when I went back to download the documentation SourceForge chose exactly that moment to do one of it's not infrequent crashes, so readings aren't on the agenda for this evening.
Frustrated in that direction I went back to the wiki and downloaded the Mk II extruder firmware source code and looked, for the first time, at PIC C code. I was very pleasantly surprised at Simon's very clear and disciplined C code. I can actually read it!
In years past one of the most repellant features of C for me has always been the nasty games programmers played with C to make their programs as dense and opaque as possible. I can't tell you how relieved I am that such games are not something that Simon enjoys. :-)
I'm actually looking forward to trying my hand at some PIC programming in C.
I have never been surprised by any 'C' code, but then I generally view it as an encryption system for assembler.
ReplyDeleteAs you've just found out, clean 'C' code can - and should - be written. The gnarly convoluted stuff is just what gets waved around by proud creators of weirdness.
Vik :v)
I guess I've lived in a programmer environment of terminal weirdness then. :-(
ReplyDeleteComments help...
ReplyDeleteVik :v)