Comments on: Renesas Target Server Design Contest

By: Binu

Binu — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:05:54 +0000

Thanks for the link

By: Joseph Yumul

Joseph Yumul — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:56:53 +0000

HeHeHe!!! i just make it run

By: Joseph Yumul

Joseph Yumul — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:16:30 +0000

I can’t make it run

By: Joseph Yumul

Joseph Yumul — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:16:21 +0000

I just got mine today

By: Joseph Yumul

Joseph Yumul — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:34:52 +0000

i mean i’m from Philippines

By: Joseph Yumul

Joseph Yumul — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:33:59 +0000

I got a meesage from Harbell Pamela and she said that i will get mine on April 1 it seems that the kit is out of stock from Philippines

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:24:22 +0000

I would like to add I believe it came with some full version compilers of C++ / Visual Basic.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:19:34 +0000

Thanks Steve, I was wondering about how I could use this thing too. I actually thought about taking off the uC but not sure if its worth the endeavor.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:31:19 +0000

I played around with the HTS Demo Board some more tonight, and I have to say I’m disappointed. First, I don’t think any Renasas MCUs are available in a DIP package, so it’s not likely you’d ever use them in a hobby project. That makes the whole exercise less interesting for me. Second, there are no external connections on the demo board (unless you count the USB debugger port or the headphone jack), so you can’t really connect it to anything else for a project. It’s basically a self-contained little world of the MCU along with some LEDs and a button, not very useful for hardware hacking. Had they sent a software simulation of the demo board instead of the actual hardware, I don’t think it would have made much difference.

The point of the design contest is to make projects that show off the HEW Target Server. HEW is their High-Performance Embedded Workshop, which is an IDE that feels like an old version of Microsoft Visual Studio. HEW Target Server is a library that you can link into your own programs to let them control HEW, and by extension, any MCU connected to the PC while HEW is running. But really this is a software design contest related to HEW, and the MCU itself isn’t relevant. With HEW Target Server, it should be possible to write your own program that does something like open multiple projects in HEW, compile them, download them to the MCU, run them, read back a result from the MCU, and verify the result. But honestly, I couldn’t come up with any very interesting ideas of how to use it, and it seems like a scripting language embedded in HEW itself would make more sense than writing a stand-alone program that drives HEW by remote control.

The kicker was that I couldn’t actually get any of the included HEW Target Server demos to communicate with HEW. They could launch HEW, but that was it. None of the HEW communication or control worked. I spent 15 minutes fiddling around trying to resolve it, but lost interest.

Bottom line: I would characterize this as a software contest, not really related to microcontrollers or hardware. If you’re interested in helping to design cool IDE software integration tools, then by all means give it a shot. But if you’re primarily interested in the kinds of electronics projects normally covered on this site, I think you’ll find the included demo board not worth the time and hassle.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:26:33 +0000

I received mine yesterday as well. I only had time to plug it in briefly. It has a USB port, headphone jack, push button, 4 LEDs, and a CDS sensor. There are also holes in the board where it looks like you could wire up external devices to the microcontroller pins, or a subset of them.