john banks

I have a microcontroller piggyback device on my ECU to which I want to write or modify an existing bit of code to display or edit a table and adjust values and send them down the RS232 in a simple protocol.

Can download QBASIC, is this a good place to start since I know basic?

Is there any easy way to get Excel to dump a table to RS232 and define a simple protocol? Excel would be nice because it does all the editing, graphing etc so well.

There is an EEPROM table in the microcontroller of 512 bytes which I can get the microcontroller to update if it receives RS232 commands. The protocol is undesigned but will be simple, along the lines of address, value, both 8 bit.

Alternatively is there a good hex editor I could use to do this task?

john banks

Found TuComHex which is a shareware hex editor that can dump the block to RS232. Would probably do, using Excel is enticing, but I suspect I need to learn about the dreaded OLE?

DuncanG

For the front-end:
It would be fairly easy to write a couple of macros for excel, connected to buttons, which would import and export the spreadsheet data to a pure data file on the PC. Its format could be in hex or 8-bit binary, whatever was easiest. That would give you the graphing & editing facility.

Back-end:
a) use the monitor program if the micro has one --
How do you communicate to your microcontroller? Presumably it has a monitor program which you talk to via a terminal emulator on your PC. Can that not load and save memory blocks from/to PC data files by zmodem protocol for example?

b) have a serial handler on the micro to implement a simple data tranfer protocol; probably always a single fixed sized data-block - keep it simple, and have a PC program to communicate with it. That seems to be the approach your thinking of. This PC program would work with the data file as specified on the command line or interactively. You could have a single program for loading and saving or you could have 2 separate ones. I'd tend to use C because thats what I'm familiar with but any programming language would do. I can give you some win32 command-line C code for serial comms if its any help. Gcc & mingw C compilers are free, but you'd probably find basic easier to use.

john banks

The microcontroller's programmer interrupts the function of the chip, so wouldn't allow programming whilst the engine is running.

Running the data from RAM with a backup to EEPROM and then perhaps two byte address, value signals could be handled whilst the uC is running the engine.