1st week progress report

I spent the past week at work mostly familiarising myself with the Lpc1313 and 1342 micro-controllers under the guidance of Mr. Petr Svoboda, who is the person responsible for all (or at least most) of the work on the firmware up to this point.
I will keep this entry brief and only summarise the results that were achieved, because I am leaving for a vacation tomorrow and I don't quite have the time to type out a long post. This also means that there will be no more posts for two weeks. I intend to go back to this one after I return and add all the necessary info and details.


Now for the results:
Firstly I set up the appropriate tool-chain for working with the Lpc1313 and 1342 micro-controllers. I keep referring to Lpc1342 even though it is not the micro-controller that is used in MagMan. This is because Mr. Svoboda 
provided me with a handy circuit board, which emulates the whole MagMan device and contains the Lpc1342 micro as well as a display, a push-button and some LEDs. These features make it more suitable for debugging and development, than the actual board which is really used. The differences between Lpc1313 and 1342 are minimal.
After that, Mr. Svoboda decided that the best way to familiarise myself with the development on these micros will be to give me "Homework" consisting of a series of tasks that my program should perform. I spent most of my time working on those and learning how to use the different peripherals on the Lpc1342, such as SysTick timer and watchdog timer; and I am now beginning to experiment with the process of rewriting the on-chip FLASH memory with data sent over the serial interface - a necessary step towards my goal of creating a boot-loader.

That's about it, see you in two weeks.