Concept of Platinum Trainers.

Concept-of-Platinum-Trainers

We, at Frontline Electronics, are pleased to introduce an advanced learning platform for the world’s most popular microcontroller, 8051, using the state of art technologies. We call this working environment as the Next Generation Platinum Trainers. The Platinum trainers sport a variety of useful features to make experimental tasks an easy one and motivate the users to work more and learn faster in the given time.

Major facilities are the availability of a big size LCD Graphical Module that displays more useful information than ever before. The trainer interaction is made simplified by using standard PC keyboard.

In the stand-alone operating environment, the trainer supports the program entry in assembly language to save time apart from easy understanding of the programs. For the assembly programs, the trainer provides full-fledged debugger using the big size LCD display and the keyboard.

Combining the trainer with any personal computer, the trainer presents an advanced working environment for the high level C based program development. Apart from all these, the trainers come with built-in self-diagnostic features to test most of the functions of the trainer and the peripherals of the microcontroller.

As you know well, even so called advanced trainers of today come with a simple facility to download the assembled code generated in the computer using a cross assembler. They use the serial port for this communication. Even then, only very few trainers come with the debugging facilities for the assembly language. Most of the time, users develop the application code using the computer and download the same into trainer for experiments and projects. In many places, especially educational institutions, staff members cannot spare enough computers for the microcontroller development that in turn slows down the students’ learning to a great extent. In our experience, even premier technical institutions expressed their difficulty to provide the computer for every experimental setup.

Because of this feedback, we developed these Platinum trainers with all the required facilities built in the trainer itself.

Now, students can develop assembly programs easily using the big size LCD and the PC keyboard. They can also debug the programs in a professional way without any restrictions. The debugger is really a professional one without compromising on features.

The hardware construction of these Platinum trainers is radically different from the other available trainers in many ways. With regular trainers, the programs are downloaded into the trainer through the serial port. The communication link between the computer and the trainer is using a serial port.

As shown below, each of these Platinum trainers sport a System On Chip (SOC) built in-to the design to substitute the functions of the computer. The SOC acts as a front-end functional facilitator for the microcontroller. This SOC is responsible for user interaction and for the program development.

As you can observe, this SOC and the microcontroller communicate with each other using a parallel communicating port whenever it is required. Apart from this communication, the SOC does not interfere with the operations of the microcontroller. There is an indirect benefit available out of this: The available serial port of the microcontroller is left free for your applications.

In short, this SOC handles the assembly program development, program debugging, local program storage, retrieval, and self-diagnostic operations. Under C development environment, the SOC interacts with the computer and manages the communication link between the computer and the microcontroller without any interference.