prefect
Home Engineering Publications
DACS: Digital Control Bus
 
  next up previous contents
Next: Physical Specifications Up: Inter-Module Specifications Previous: Audio Signal Distribution   Contents

Digital Control Bus

The modular design of the DACS subsystems begs for a flexible means of connecting a variety of PC boards together such that the internal microcontroller ($\mu$C ) may communicate with them. Thus, a ``pseudo-bus'' (dubbed the Pbus ) is defined, to be generated by the $\mu$C . The Pbus is a master-slave type of bus, where the master is the microcontroller board, and the slaves are the various devices connected to the bus. The signal levels on the bus are standard TTL levels. To remove any confusion, it should be noted that the Pbus is not the same as the $\mu$C bus, but is rather built on top of the underlying $\mu$C bus structure. This abstraction layer allows many different types of controllers to act as Pbus masters, thus allowing a virtually limitless choice of microcontrollers and microprocessors. Additionally, simple PC-hosted hardware can be constructed to allow easy Pbus development, testing and debugging. A simple, but extraordinarily useful PC-hosted bus-snooper will likely be constructed in order to aid later firmware debugging tasks.

Subsections

Steve Richardson 2000-07-06
Table of Contents

[PDF] [Whole document in PDF 1.9MB]

[more photos and information]

 
Page last modified:
Copyright © 1993-2000 prefect - All Rights Reserved.