The Chinese words for crisis is 危機 (weiji). As with most Chinese word-objects, it is made up of two independent words, 危(wei) / danger and 機(ji) / opportunity. And so the global financial crisis also presents us with some opportunities to renew ourselves. (..click to read more…)
Crisis and Opportunity Read Post »
Tough Survivors As I said in the last blog entry, independent embedded C/C++ compiler companies are becoming rare birds. Of the independent companies that support multiple platforms, besides us ImageCraft, there are Green Hills (US), IAR (SE), Cosmic (FR), Rowley (UK), and… um, I think that’s it. Since being bought up, Hiware/Metrowerks primarily target Freescale chips; Hi-Tech clearly will concentrate only on Microchip’s PIC; Keil, despite being an “ARM company,” still sell tools for the 8051, C166 etc. probably because the money is good, but who knows how long that will last?… Most if not all compiler companies were started
Competing with “Free” Software Read Post »
There are only about 50-100 assembly lines (if that) in the core executive portion of eMOS, but like all other executives, it takes blood, sweat, and tear to get it right. After a night of hardcore debugging, I am happy to say that eMOS for 430 is alive with the messaging routines working quite well. A bits more testing and code cleanup, and modifying the documentation and it’s good to go. As per design, only3-4 lines of C code need to change, to accommodate the difference between AVR and the MSP430 (other than the device specific code of course). There
Product Development Update Read Post »
One aspect being a small company is that we can and often need to move fast. Back in 1996 or so, we were one of the first embedded compiler companies to have a presence on the web. To wit, guess how many variation of imagecraft and imagecraftXYZ .com .net etc. are out there? In response to the current financial situation, we need to make changes in our plans. First and foremost, we will continue the path began by the eMOS release – we will add more software stacks to our offering. It makes sense for the customers and it makes
New Year, New Challenges, New Plans Read Post »
We are now porting eMOS to the TI MSP430. The TI MSP430 excels at minimizing power consumption, and with eMOS’ system hooks to shut down the system when it is quiescent, eMOS is a good fit for the MSP430 family. We expect porting and testing will take about a month so production release should be around the beginning of March.
eMOS for TI MSP430 Read Post »
