May 2006, Issue 190

ARM-Based Modern Answering Machine
Philips ARM Design Contest 2005 First Prize

IMPROVEMENTS

It would be presumptuous to consider the TAM-TAM a finished product. Just making sure that all of the error conditions in the file system are handled correctly would be a huge task.

I would like to add a password on the web server login page and a DNS query. Currently, the SMTP mail server’s IP address must be entered manually.

As for the hardware, I would like to integrate the wireless bridge inside the box. Wi-Fi cards are available in SD/MMC format, but it would probably be impossible to access the secret recipe to enable such a card.

The LPC2138 was definitely the right microcontroller for this project. I enjoyed its ability to run off the integrated flash memory and RAM without any wait states. The 60-MIPS budget allowed me to focus more time on the development of algorithms than on counting cycles in critical sections of code. Finally, for someone like me who hates polling, the interrupt handler is certainly one of the most flexible I have seen.