HART Communications and Embedded Systems Software Development

The engineering office Borst Automation has been around for thirty years now. Before that, I had been working on developing embedded systems for measurement technology for 10 years, even though they weren't even called embedded systems at the time. Microprocessor technology was simply too new.

If you are looking for someone who has lots of new ideas and sufficient experience to help you with your software project, you are at the right place.

HartTools 7.5: HART Test Tools and Software Development Support

We have developed a software package especially for developers of HART devices, with which the HART communication protocol stack functions can be monitored and analyzed. We called this package FrameAlyst. There is also a Windows Library (DLL) that can be used to develop more complex applications for device testing or for the automated use of HART devices and other embedded systems. You can find offers for this software under the topic 'Quotations'.

A detailed documentation of HartTools 7.5 can be found in the Downloads area. There you will also find a possibility to download the fully functional software package to test it free of charge for 30 days.

Each of you knows what software abstraction means from your cell phone. Most mobile phones work with Android, whereby the actual operating system is Linux. Android only has the task of hiding the complexity of the Linux subsystem from users. That is called Abstraction. If you are interested in how to apply abstraction in an embedded system, you can find some thoughts about it in the Coffee Corner.

Both Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code are very popular as a development environment. The questions that arise are the following.

1. Is it possible to develop platform independently with this?

2. Can I use the same source code?

3. How suitable are they for embedded systems?

4. Can you use them quasi co-existent?

In the following you will find a Windows demo program, the build of which is created once with Visual Studio 2019 and with Visual Studio Code and with which question 4 is practically answered.

A detailed description can be found in the data sheet.

Data sheet: One for Two SCM.

If you want to take a closer look at the example, you can also download the source code.

This is certainly not a new topic, but one that arose shortly after the introduction of the microprocessor in device technology. But as complexity and interconductivity increase, it becomes more important to keep device development costs in check.

We are also working on this topic and are trying to design a framework that not only contains reusable code, but also enables porting to different platforms. I even know from my own experience that you can construct an embedded system without an operating system.
Here is our first post on this topic:

Embedded Devices Simulation, Part 1