Development Environments
The following are the development environments used for each stage of development.
Many development environments for the Firmware were considered for this project. However, for increased time to completion and simplicity of development the MikroC development environment for the PIC is utilized. Advantages for using MikroC are the well organized documentation and the wide array of Hardware and Software Libraries that can be easily utilized for use for the project. The extensive support of MikroC for PIC devices is perhaps the best strong point for choosing it as the major development platform for the Firmware.
#Software In order to interface the device with the PC, suitable Software has to be developed to facilitate PIC and PC communications. The researchers decided to use Visual Studio C# for Windows as the Development Environment to support such purpose. Using the Visual Studio C# development environment will significantly increase development time and decrease debugging difficulty due to its fully featured debugging environment.
In order to improve hardware development methods suitable simulation software for hardware components is utilized. The Proteus VSM suite is used for simulating the PIC and its associated hardware components. Also, the Proteus has support for simulating USB communications with the PC. However this only supported Proteus – Windows XP environment. So a Virtual Machine installation of Windows XP using Virtual Box was setup to facilitate this simulation.
