Ken's 8051 Page

I have been using the 8051 off and on for years after Steve Ciarcia first introduced me to them in his Circuit Cellar column in Byte magazine. (you may now read Steve in his Circuit Cellar Ink magazine which he started after leaving Byte)

I have a number of ongoing 8051 based projects, in various states of completion which I would love to share with the 'net community:

• C based Pre-emptive Multitasking Kernel for the 8051. This small, lightweight kernel makes developing sophisticated control and user interface applications simple. This is now the c8051kernel SourceForge project
• Multidrop rs485 packet based networking protocal. Currently master-slave based. I am interested in enhancing it to use 9bit interrupts and be peer based.
• Chord Keyboard for the PC. Reduce hand, wrist strain with this low movement chording keyboard.
• Sony Disk Changer controller.
• LED Light bar. Eye movement causes the single row of modulated LEDs to display a moving 2 dimensional image.
• X10 control interface.
• Networked room controller including motion, switch closure, temperature detection. This unit is intended to work with my expert system based electronic buttler!
• Audio/Video crossbar controlled by our favorite micro.
• Unistroke like pen input system
• Others...

I have been using a copy of Dave Dunfield's MICRO-C, which I ported to UNIX, for the past few years after I decided to use high level languages exclusively on microcontrollers, and to optimize for space and speed using inline assembly. I highly recomend Dave's product! However I have learned some tricks the hard way. Perhaps I will write these up soon.

Please email me and let me know what materials I should put online, first, and if you would like to help developing the project.

Coming up with a reasonable Copywrite message is one thing holding me back from posting source code. Possibly I should adopt the GNU Copyleft? This feels a bit restrictive for embedded systems. What do you think?