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The AMX Prototyping System |
The AMX Prototyping System
(TAPSTM)
is a Windows® utility for
testing embedded systems developed using any of KADAK's
32-bit AMX Real-Time Multitasking Kernels.
Using TAPS, your AMX application can be coded and tested prior
to moving to the actual target hardware platform.
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CPU |
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Pentium (or better) at 100 MHz (or greater)
with 32 Mb of RAM |
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| OS |
Any Windows 32-bit OS including:
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000 or XP |
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| Tools |
Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 or later |
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A TAPS application runs as a single thread within a Win32
application. TAPS includes a fully functional AMX implementation
which does not use Win32 services to simulate
multitasking operation.
Instead, TAPS provides a complete AMX multitasking environment
which operates within the single TAPS Win32 thread. The TAPS
version of AMX executes in a non-preemptive manner without
support for interrupts.
As with any AMX implementation, the current task will always
be the highest priority task which is ready for execution.
However, under TAPS, the current task cannot be preempted by an
external event such as an interrupt.
The current task will only be suspended if it calls some
AMX function which forces the task to wait for some event.
When used with TAPS, your application tasks must not be
compute bound.
Any compute bound task will prevent TAPS from generating its simulated
AMX clock ticks, thereby precluding the use of AMX timing services.
If a task must "spin", it must call the AMX function
to briefly delay from time to time for at least one AMX tick.
External events are simulated by the TAPS
Event Generator, a function which is called by the TAPS
Control Task, a built-in task that runs at the lowest AMX priority.
The TAPS Event Generator simulates "hardware" clock ticks
at the frequency specified in your application's
AMX System Configuration Module.
Device I/O operations can be simulated if your application
uses the low level I/O functions provided by AMX. These low-level
I/O operations are funneled through the TAPS I/O Access Procedure
which can be modified to mimic the results of I/O operations
on your hardware.
The TAPS Library provides support for two simulated hardware
devices: a real-time clock and a serial I/O device (UART).
The simulated clock device provides timing based on the Windows
Performance Counters.
These counters provide a very accurate timing source.
Since TAPS does not support interrupts, AMX clock ticks are
generated at the required intervals
by calls from the TAPS Event Generator.
The simulated serial I/O device is a polled (not interrupt driven)
device that is accessed via the simple AMX serial I/O interface
provided with the AMX Sample Program. Character input
is read from the stdin data stream and written to the
stdout data stream. These are the standard data streams
available to all Win32 console applications.
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You can also download the complete
TAPS User's Guide.
This on-line HTML guide describes how to use TAPS to test
an AMX application on the Windows desktop.
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