Getting Started

Is there a getting started guide or forum posting that would give me some help in finding my way round sourceforge etc as I'm trying to download the firmware C code and I'm finding bits all over the place with no idea which is the true! version or is it simple lots of peoples different versions?

What are the differences between "branches", "tags" & "trunk"?

I want to try and run the C code in a complier i have as by the sound of it the SDCC complier is not so good i was especially keen to try using a 18F chip and the C18 Microchip complier as it's free

The code as best i can tell is spread over many files as in extruder1 & extruder2 with extruder1 having a main() but not extruder2 so i assume the SDCC complier reads them both at compile time? Is this correct?

I also note they include "pic14.h" i thought we were using pic16 or is this just legacy and it all works OK?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/13/2007 04:58AM by Ian Adkins.

I don't know about the code organization as I have never looked at it, but here is the typical version control arrangement:

trunk - this is typically the current code. It may or may not work. Good version control practice means that it should compile and function to some degree. Usually bug fixes are applied to the trunk.

branches - this is where most development should occur. Code in branches may be completely broken. They may contain developments that will never be merged back into the trunk. However typically developements in branches are merged into the trunk once complete. There can be multiple branches of development in parallel.

tags - this is where releases are stored. When the development team decides that the code is ready for release, they put a copy in here with the version number. Code in here should be complete and functional. But is may be horribly out of date.

So try the code in the trunk first. If it doesn't work try the latest version in tags.

Andy

The header is "pic14" because the 16F series have 14-bit instruction words. The lower-end PIC10s and some PIC12s have 12-bit instructions, and the 18 series have 16-bit instructions. It's a bit confusing, but I guess it makes sense from the compiler's perspective.

Like Andy said, try the stuff in the trunk's firmware directory, I think that's what the current releases are based on. There's also a branch for autoconf-based building with a more recent version of SDCC, but I believe they're functionally the same, they just have different sets of hacks to make SDCC happy. Most of the code should port to C18 without much trouble.