Many one-chip microcontrollers are now easily obtained by electronics parts stores, evaluation kit, and so on. Especially, microcontrollers with flash memory are adequate for amateur hobbiest, because:
Hitachi H8 series is one of the most popular flash microcontrollers. It is
very popular for hobbiest in Japan, because Akizuki electronics
(the
most famous kit developer/store in Akihabara) sells small H8 board kit about
4,000 yen.($40!!)
H8 is a middle-class microcontroller, and have resources (RAM, ROM, I/O functions) enough to run C codes.
To develop programs for H8, you need:
GCC and binutils by GNU [1] supports H8 as one of many supported CPU. These tools provides C compiler to object format converter in this list.
Cygnus provides simple C standard library for embedded CPU. It contains stdio , stdlib , string, math library. But it does not contains hardware-specific routine, such as file I/O and OS support. Note that printf and scanf are included in file I/O.
Flash programmer is a tool to put bootstrap code to H8, and write program binary to the flush ROM. It communicates to H8 with serial I/O (RS-232C).
To install whole development environment to your Linux box, follow these steps:
Hitachi
web
page. Programmer's manual and hardware manual are available. Hardware manual
is useful for programming I/O hardware.
kp9m-iwt@asahi-net.or.jp