Published July 2001

FINE TUNING AN EMBEDDED IDEA

Part 1: The Land of BL2000
by Fred Eady

Start • Z-World’s BL2000 • C Me… • Lock and Load • Acquire the Voltage Data • Transport and Display the Voltage Data • Just the Beginning • Sources and PDF

Over Memorial Day weekend, Greg Lake, bassist and lead singer of Emerson Lake & Palmer, formerly of King Crimson, dropped by the Florida room to give me some much needed personal bass guitar lessons. For those of you who are reading my column for the first time, I thump on the strings now and then with the best of them. My jet-black Fender Precision bass is known as "Luci" (pronounced like Lucy and named after B.B. King’s "Lucille") to visiting Florida- room musicians. Between lessons, Greg mentioned the increasing number of Rabbits and their Z-World cousins lounging on the Florida-room "active hardware" shelves. At that instant, Greg and I looked at each other and smiled. This vision of ever-growing Rabbit processors conjured up an old song Greg sang in the stadium gigs called "Karn Evil 9." The first line of the song is, "Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends."

The deadline was looming to submit another article for the online version of Circuit Cellar. I had decided to introduce some new products from Z-World and Rabbit Semiconductor. I told Greg that my bunny jokes had to stop or the Circuit Cellar staff would add my next article to a pot of boiling rabbit stew. Greg mused for a moment, kicked out a nifty little lick on Luci, pointed arbitrarily at the shelf, and said, "Why don’t you do the next online article on this BL2000 thingie." Greg has a handle on the guitar, but his understanding of embedded systems needs some work. Anyway, the next line of "Karn Evil 9" is a fitting introduction to this month’s offering and it goes something like this: "We’re so glad you could attend. Come inside, come inside."

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