Ask HN: What is the most difficult tech/dev challenge you ever solved?

Re:Ask HN: What is the most difficult tech/dev challenge you... by ijager on Sunday April 27, 2014 @06:45AM (#7654626)

I've had the same experiences with the C18 compiler. Using that compiler, building a simple 6-channel PWM application becomes quite difficult. For every interrupt, the compiler would copy the entire (call)-stack to a different memory location, then enter the interrupt routine and finally copy the entire stack back, resulting in latencies of ±100 cycles before and after the interrupt. So, to get rid of the timing jitter, we had to fire the timers early, and then wait for the final timer counts in the ISR.

Later, we switched to the NXP LPC platform using only open source tools: GCC ARM Embedded toolchain, OpenOCD + gdb for debugging and vim, make as 'IDE'. What a relief.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most difficult tech/dev challenge you... by LeonM on Sunday April 27, 2014 @07:02AM (#7654652)

Funny that you mention that, I am currently in the process of designing the "next" generation of the project in question. Luckily I was able to convince the product owner to switch from PIC18 to NXP ARM chips.

I have loads of experience with the LPC series and I only realized how nice they are to work with until this project came by. Also, GCC + OpenOCD + gdb is a very nice toolchain to work with, although the first versions of OpenOCD were a bit of a pain to get (and keep!) running.

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