>Friends,
>I was wondering if anybody has bought or tried UMPS? If so what do you think?
>                Best regards,
>                Steven

Hi Steve,

I've been using UMPS for almost a year now so I've seen it grow quite a bit
in maturity and usefulness.

I really like it - so much so when "The Microcontroller Handbook" and
"Programming and Customizing the 8051" come out, there will be a demo
version of UMPs on the CD-ROMs that come with the books.

The editor and assembler are pretty standard and UMPS can access MPASM and
some other "C" compilers instead of it's own assembler.

One word about the assembler, it is kind of picky about the source code
format used; I like to put spaces between parameters,

ie:

  movf  Reg, w

and UMPS will choke on it, there can't be any spaces between parameters.

A nice feature of the editor is that it will highlight correctly formatted
instructions; if you are religeous about always having the instructions
highlighted, you'll never have syntax errors.  Comments are in blue and
italicized and constants and such are other colours (I'm colour-blind, so I
don't really pay attention to them).

The range of devices it can work with is pretty amazing (PIC, 8051, 68HCxx,
AVR, COP8...); it's one tool that you can use for all your MCU development.


What really sets it apart is the simulator.  It does a pretty good job of
simulating a pretty good range of devices; buttons, LEDs, LCD displays,
serial I/O, logic chips, ADCs and so on.  I found it to be quite fast (30K+
instruction cycles per second on a 133 MHz Pentium, but this could drop to
3K instructions per second if you have a lot of windows open that need to be
updated every second (ie internal/external RAM)).

"Wiring" the peripherals is quite easy although with some you'll have to
play around with them a bit to really understand how they work.


It's really a great "what if" tool; I just finished writing "Programming and
Customizing the 8051" and I used UMPS exclusively in the book; I was able to
emulate all the projects in the book including a bit-banging serial routine
for an emulator that is included in the book.

Support has been very good and Phillipe has been great about responding to
requests for adding features/simulated devices as well as responding to
problems (or just things you don't understand).  Over the past year I've
sent Phillipe a few notes a hundred lines long with problems, questions,
suggestions and requests and he's responded with very complete answers and
schedules for implementations.

The only real downside is it's cost - it's pretty expensive.  Where you
could justify it is that you could use it to displace the need for an
emulator or logic analyzer.  I know that if you need multiple copies,
discounts are available.

I would recommend it to professionals that need a consistant tool for
developing applications on multiple platforms.  UMPS and a DataIO or Needham
programmer is really all you would need to develop applications for a
variety of devices.

For the US, goto

http://www.wirz.com

to download a demonstration copy.

myke

This week in myke's Book Room: "The Night Crew" by John Sandford

http://www.myke.com/Book_Room