xTimecomposer V12b and slicekit tutorial test drive

Technical questions regarding the XTC tools and programming with XMOS.
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Folknology
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xTimecomposer V12b and slicekit tutorial test drive

Post by Folknology »

Ok I figured I should go through the provided tutorials in order to try out the new V12 tools, here are some observations from my short test (please note that I do not usually use eclipse I'm more of a command line guy so forgive my IDE ignorance):
Click on the Tutorial Example LED PWM Driver xSOFTip component in the Misc category.

The Developer Column shows information on the component including a description of what it does, its features and which xKIT Development Kits are suitable for use with this xSOFTip.
Actually I finally found the PWM tutorial under Audio>DSP ?

With the PWM tutorial it asks you to add a new task to a second core, I fell straight into the trap of using tile[0] rather than tile [1] to add the core task, maybe emphasising the use of logical core would have helped here but clearly the exercise itself is in this case core agnostic! Clearly a newbie might not have fallen for the double think and done exactly what was asked without question, but this just shows the conditioning I have already acquired for what 'Core' means when engaging with XS1 development and as such should serve as a warning for existing developers. What would have removed any ambiguity was a complete code listing rather than just showing the bits one should add in the tutorial and generally I think this is a good idea for tutorials anyhow.
Double-click on a transition in the Waves window when the cursor changes to a pointing finger.

The output statement that caused the transition is highlighted in the Editor window, allowing you to link the transition to the source code.
This didn't happen for me, double clicking did not highlight the output instruction in the editor window, it didn't seem to influence the editing frame at all.


Moving from the simulator and onto running this in hardware with an actual SliceKit and the GPIO module I found:
Make a temperature controlled LED dimmer
If you go onto add the I2C ADC temp sensor part of the slicekit PWM tutorial, it does read and report back temperature. However this temp value is never used to control the led dimming as it seems to be indicated aim of the exercise? I kept wondering if I had managed to skip part of it accidentally, but couldn't find any skipped sections. If the idea here is that the user you go onto perform this as an exercise themselves should it not be hinted at in the tutorial?


General issues I had (maybe related to Eclipse running in Ubuntu) :
Couldn't seem to use horizontal scrolling in project pain
Artefacts appearing when scrolling the xSoftip frame

Over all the intro tutorials I tried so far are a great start for someone coming to the Xmos platform, although personally I find eclipse a little ugly and cumbersome to use, The slicekit combined with softip and the new tools are simple enough to get up an running quickly.

Thumbs Up!!

regards
Al
Ali
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Joined: Mon Jun 07, 2010 12:50 pm

Post by Ali »

Hi Al,

thanks for the feedback, we are fixing the problems you found.

The LED temperature control dimmer is a typo from a previous revision, you haven't missed anything in the tutorial.

Cheers
Ali