Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: Klondike - 16 chip ASIC Open Source Board - Preliminary
by
BkkCoins
on 31/05/2013, 04:37:01 UTC
BkkCoins,
     Are you sure the firmware can handle everything ok? It only has 1Kbytes of SRAM.
I'm about to order boards for the Quarter Stick DIY and I wanted to make sure.

thanks.
I believe so. Work so far indicates that it will be very close with a work queue of 4 items (192 bytes), and a 108 byte buffer for pushing work. So if it gets too tight for that I may have to drop to only 2 work items queued. Compiled with the USB stack it's using about half the RAM, without my code and work queue, (and 727 bytes with my code but no push buffer yet), but I also think that could be optimized and reduced a some if really need be (the stack seems a little bloated in C instead of assembly. I can't fathom why they didn't do it in assembly for something that could be included in every PIC - though maybe they expect their users to optimize their own versions). By slowing down the push-work a bit with a buffer switch mid-way, I could cut 48 bytes and keep the queue at 4 but I haven't gone over everything looking to optimize RAM.

Also, I haven't tried the Pro XC-8 yet. Apparently it cuts down a lot of code space, though whether it can get much better at RAM use is questionable. I'll have a better estimate later this afternoon after I integrate in the "push work" assembly code. I'd code everything in assembler before giving up.