How useful is AVRco

Hallo Rolf,

auf gut deutsch, das was noch nicht drinnen ist!! Sprich der Client (Ist bei Modbus so!)!

Liebe Grüße
Tassilo

@Tassilo
If I understood german well (I apologize if I made a mistake), you were wrong both times. In MODBUS terminology MODBUS SERVER = MODBUS SLAVE, and MODBUS CLIENT = MODBUS MASTER. I know it's a little confusing but that's the way it is. First time you mentioned MODBUS SERVER, and in next message you corrected yourself saying MODBUS SLAVE, but that is the same thing. MODBUS SERVER (=SLAVE) is already implemented in AvrCo with RTU and ASCII serial line protocols, so master (PC for example) can read many AVR slaves. MODBUS is by specification single master multi slaves protocol. I suppose that you originally wanted to say that you want MODBUS MASTER (=CLIENT). I didn't implement MODBUS MASTER (=CLIENT) in AvrCo, but I can if Rolf contacts me on this matter. There are no plans for it, yet. However, I think that implementation of MODBUS SLAVE for ethernet has much bigger audience and it may be more important for AvrCo. Anyway, it's up to Rolf to decide if any of this is needed and should be scheduled at all.

Here is another suggestion...

I attached a picture showing Siemens Simatic STEP7 SCL running online. If you look carefully, you can see that cursor is in line 162, and that starting from that line values of all visible variables are shown in right window. Values are continually updated, and that is very handy for following what's going on. How could that be applied to AvrCo? Well, maybe one way could be to have an invisible break at code where cursor is, and then variable values could be downloaded from AVR and shown in window attached to pascal source code window. Somewhere in menues (or directly in some editfield of attached window) we could have an option to set if we want update to happen every scan (each pass of program counter over that invisible break is counted as one scan), every 100th scan, every 500th scan, etc. It seams to me that this is more practical then entering update to happen every 0.5 seconds, or each second, or something like that, but I don't mind.

What do you think?

@Rolf:
Don't look at the syntax, that's not the point. Look at debugging window on the right that shows continually updated online values of all shown variables. That's what might be interesting to implement to make AvrCo even better. Right now, we have many steps to take if we want to monitor variables in our AVRs online. If we borrow this idea from big(ger) brother ;D , then we all get elegant way to just run the code and monitor values of all variables that are shown. No typing, no clicking, no menus and no popup windows at all. Just one click (actually, this would be default in my AvrCo). This new window should be attached to right side of pascal source window, and we should be able to change update interval and be able to switch it on/off completelly. I can confirm that this is really a time saver when debugging.