Issue 100 November 1998
emWare Top to Bottom
Part 1: Monitoring via the Internet

PREPARING TO PROGRAM

Although the emWare 101 course you just took was very rudimentary, I think you can see the possibilities that exist. emWare is designed to integrate into your application and provide a layer by which you can connect over virtually any TCP/IP-based network.

The basis to any emWare application is round-robin multitasking. Simply put, this scheme gives all the parts of an application equal access to the processor resources. It means that no one part of the application should seize the processor resources for any abnormal length of time.

For example, let’s say your application had to read some push-button switches to make a decision. If your program polled the switches in such a manner that the routine loops until a switch was released, then other parts of the program could lose or miss information they need to make their program-related decisions. If a program segment was waiting for incoming asynchronous data and the switch segment was looping…well, you can guess what happens.

PICING UP WHERE WE LEFT OFF

The final product of this discussion will be a PIC-based micro server attached to an embedded-PC gateway serving a remote web browser.

I’ve introduced you to some of the emWare concepts at a high level. Next time, I’ll drop to the treetops and talk turkey about what it takes under the covers to put our PIC on the network.

By the way, I did finish the EMIT install while you were looking at Visual Café. Thus, modern software technology from emWare has once again proven that it doesn’t have to be complicated to be embedded.