ISAC (3)

In this third instalment in the series on the intelligent sensor/actuator controller (or ISAC) we look at the software development environment for the Analog Devices MicroConverter. Following on from the description of the device in part 1 and the construction of a prototyping system in part 2 we are now in a position to write our first program for the ISAC cube.The Analog Devices MicroConverter can, in principle, be programmed using any of the familiar programming languages, including Assembler51, Basic52, Pascal51, C51 and so on. The result of the translation carried out by the assembler or compiler is simply an Intel Hex file, which must be downloaded, either serially or in parallel, into the MicroConverter’s Flash memory.However, Analog Devices offers a complete software development environment optimised for use with the MicroConverter family, freely downloadable from the Internet: the ‘MicroConverter QuickStart Development System V3.0’ [1]. This allows programs to be developed in assembler or in C.