PICNIC 3 Status
PICNIC 3 is on the way and will have many features.
Some are listed here.
Features
ISA Adderssing
For only one board we don't need all that addressing
pins. Perhaps this version will use only one pin to addres the board,
or none. Another possibility is using the ISA Bus interface, that is
already implemented by Simon, to interface with another NIC card or a
modem and make a pic router!
PICNIC Bus
This bus will allow picnic to have several pics
working as a parallel machine. The bus will have 8 bits of data and 3
or more for addressing, and about 2 for control. Memory modules, I/O
modules, and new stuff will all be connected to this bus.
PICNIC Shell
A shell that will be accessed by telnet or
serial port will allow the user to list configurations, set ip address,
netmask, gateway and other configurations that will be stored in EEPROM.
This will also allow users to run a program, reboot
the system, and much more.
PICNIC Shell will also activate/deactivate the flash
programming over the network or serial cable. This will allow us to
update the entire firmware, pages, and programs over the network.
Minimal filesystem
Well, it will not be a file system. Just a table
telling in wich device and where in this device are the programs and
pages. This will use the pic's flash, or external devices, and i'm
thinking in commands like ls, cat, rm.
Triggers
Possibility of programming the system to send a TCP
packet to a destination when some condition occurs, such as analog
signal is more than 3v, or serial data has arrived, or even, a simply
switch change.
Routing
To implement the above item, we need to know if the
data must be sent to the gateway or not, by calculating the network via
the netmask. This will be implemented too, because picnic 2 only
responds to received packets. With this data will can be sent to
anywhere.
I/O Devices
This consists of building the devices that will be
connected to picnic bus.
There will be independent boards each with a
function, such as memory module, serial port module, digital i/o,
analog i/o, relay controled i/o, and much more.
The idea is to make an easy to implement protocol
for this bus in order to allow anyone implementing its i/o module for
picnic as needed.
Current Status
By now, only I (Rafael) am working on new features.
Help wanted!
There is still no public release of picnic 3, but i
gues in the next weeks there will be a pre release. I expect that most
of the listed features will be working in about 5 months.
09/19/03
Rafael