New member as at June 4 2009

[SteveCurtis]

Hello all. I thought I would post here to announce that I am actually a person, especially after reading the material about spam bots and other jolly nuisances in the introductory area.

My interests are CNC machines and the use of PC hardware to behave as an embedded and dedicated systems with an emphasis on fast, jitter free hardware interrupt responses.

I'm also interested in Digital Signal Processing in the PC, mainly as the core speeds are so fast and the platform is so inexpensive!

My background is in electronic engineering but moved to programming and then a 7 1/2 year spate of purgatory doing I.T. infrastructure for a large blue logo-ed Australian banking corporate as a contractor on 3 and 6 month rotations.

Basically now I want to get my hands dirty again and do some proper creative work. Looking at MASM32 makes me again feel like a complete novice, something that has recurred so many times in the past 20 years.  Hopefully I can put some hours in now and get with the inner workings of MS operating systems and write from the ground floor to find out what really goes on. It will be fun and I have so much to learn.

Steve

[dedndave]

hi Steve - welcome to MASM32
i am in much the same boat, or at least, i was a few months ago
even though i had years of experience programming 16-bit assembler, everything looked foriegn
if you google Iczelion's tutorials, as well as Kip Irvine, they can get you started
i think one of the links in the upper right corner has Iczelion
- Dave

[SteveCurtis]

hi Steve - welcome to MASM32
i am in much the same boat, or at least, i was a few months ago
even though i had years of experience programming 16-bit assembler, everything looked foriegn
if you google Iczelion's tutorials, as well as Kip Irvine, they can get you started
i think one of the links in the upper right corner has Iczelion
- Dave

Many thanks Dave.
Yet another steep (brick wall) learning curve to be sure! I have spent a number of hours today looking around and have followed up many links to other ASM type sites e.g. 'Donkey' and GoAsm some others. I am amazed by the sheer number of opportunities to get material once I started looking in earnest.  I bought the Jeff Duntemann book 'Assembly Language Step By Step' which is based around NASM and the IDE that comes with package and that got me kicked off recently. However I really want to unpick the MS windows stuff and probably write Win32 code more than the Linux bent this latest book has. What I really want to get to, is have some embedded Single board computer x86 machines running assembler doing CNC control, talking to a host that runs a Delphi app on WinXP via Ethernet, so bye bye RS232...(it's a plan....! :wink)

Steve 

[hutch--]

Hi Steve Welcome on board. You should have a ton of fun here  :bg

[UtillMasm]

hi, emmmh, welcome...
:green2

[dedndave]

i have done a little work with embedded controllers
the one i played with the most was a 486dx in a hand-held unit
i think that project tanked - lol - not sure - i did my bit and got out of there
the guys running that thing were better at spending money than making it
i designed the keyboard and programmable audio interface and wrote the 16-bit driver routines
the guy doing their software converted the small routines to 32-bit, i suppose
the hardware did all the work

[Mark Jones]

Welcome Steve, sounds like fun. If you want even more options, check out http://www.microchip.com/ or http://www.atmel.com/default1.asp --- they make full-featured single-chip microcontroller solutions today with amazing capability. It's entirely possible to control a 5-axis CnC from one of these lower-end chips (sounds like one hell of an engineering task though, good luck!) :bg

[Vortex]

Hi Steve,

Welcome to the forum.

[Farabi]

Welcome to the forum.
If what you mean with signal processing is face recognition or speech recognition, we had same interest. I Hope we can learn each other. Currently I studying OpenCV, and since Im no good at reading math symbol am not into the inner code of OpenCV, if you have understand basic of assembler coding I will give you my code to take a look. Just tell me when you are ready.

PS:
MASM License is not allowed us to do Open Source thing, and Im fine with it, so dont spread the code.

[SteveCurtis]

Welcome Steve, sounds like fun. If you want even more options, check out http://www.microchip.com/ or http://www.atmel.com/default1.asp --- they make full-featured single-chip microcontroller solutions today with amazing capability. It's entirely possible to control a 5-axis CnC from one of these lower-end chips (sounds like one hell of an engineering task though, good luck!) :bg

Hi Mark,
Thanks for that. I will take a gander. I have seen some of the Atmel offerings in the past but I'll certainly take a closer look here. I guess the main thing I like about the PC architecture though is that is is so ubiquitous and there are just so many versions that pretty much do the same thing architecturally. I must have 10+ working Pentium II or better boxes given to me for free. Also I came by 4 new 1.8Ghz dual core single board PCs (industrial) for $100 each - with CPU's! All I had to to do was buy 2GB ram for each.. I also have 2 new 486DX 133, half size single board PCs, older but still gruntier than anything I'm going to build bespoke wise... ... Anyway you get my drift..

The main issue with getting to the power of the machine is the MS OS's and allowing access to hardware I/O. So if I can unpick things and understand what-is-what, I might be able to have my cake and eat it... I can build an ISA bus peripheral boards no problem. (AD's DA's, Ports etc) ..I would buy PCI boards (too painful to build these). However the CPU's are all very grunty. Even a lowly 1GHz Celeron. No embedded system I will ever build will have this core of memory/power that has been so thoroughly tested and developed..... :dazzled:

Steve

[SteveCurtis]

Welcome to the forum.
If what you mean with signal processing is face recognition or speech recognition, we had same interest. I Hope we can learn each other. Currently I studying OpenCV, and since Im no good at reading math symbol am not into the inner code of OpenCV, if you have understand basic of assembler coding I will give you my code to take a look. Just tell me when you are ready.

PS:
MASM License is not allowed us to do Open Source thing, and Im fine with it, so dont spread the code.

Hi Farabi,

I'd love to share what you are up to. Bear in mind I'm getting back to this stuff after 15 years of not doing it. My DSP needs brushing up also! I have a very good conact with image processing. He is a commercial chap and I have worked for him over the years so he might be a useful contact. I've spent that past few years (since 2000-2008) working for a bank in I.T. infrastructure, so my brain is pretty soft right now.. My main interest for DSP is control systems, filtering, Fourier transforms, adaptive control and such, but there is much for me to come to terms with just getting things going with assembler and the operating system(s). Stay tuned though I'd be happy to play with anything. No problems not spreading code. If anything that I do becomes remotely commercial I will be addressing these issues for sure. This is all a learning exercise for now..

Steve

[Farabi]

Steve:
I though you are student, I guess you're a professional. But Okay I will send the source to you, I think I'll send it within 4 days because my laptop is borrowed by my sister. I hope you can learn something from it.

[hutch--]

Just a note on the following comment.

> MASM License is not allowed us to do Open Source thing, and Im fine with it, so dont spread the code.

You can happily spread your code around, give it away or sell it but you cannot use it as leverage to force others to do the same, this is the problem with "open source", it is a restrictive licencing system that is excluded by the MASM and Microsoft licence.

[Farabi]

Just a note on the following comment.

> MASM License is not allowed us to do Open Source thing, and Im fine with it, so dont spread the code.

You can happily spread your code around, give it away or sell it but you cannot use it as leverage to force others to do the same, this is the problem with "open source", it is a restrictive licencing system that is excluded by the MASM and Microsoft licence.

Oh thanks, I guess I miss understand the license.

[UtillMasm]

open souce is release source, no more anything else in china.