Mesa sanity check - new user

spumco wrote:

Too late!

Boards in hand, new computer loaded w/LCNC and I'm already bugging everyone here with "How do I...?" questions.

-R

The first wire is always the scariest!

Wires I can handle. Its the HAL gibberish that's got me worried.

And thanks for the timely video, Rod. Mucho helpful.

Well HAL is just like wiring too but some people complicate it with shortcuts to put more than one action on a line.
Hal is simple.
1. It has Components, think a computer chip. They have input and output pins on them
2. It has a signal, this is the same as a wire or trace connected to the pin on that computer chip.
3. It has the individual pins on the component.
4. You cannot connect multiple signals to a pin
5. But you can connect a signal to multiple pins
6. loadrt loads a component (places it on the board)
7. addf hooks the component to a thread (usually the servo thread) that looks after it. Maybe thats the power rail on a board with multiple voltages.
8. net creates signals and connects them to pins.

So you hook an output pin to a wire (signal)
and you connect that wire (signal) to an input pinand maybe to another pin
but you cannot doas my-output-pin is already connected.
You can change where the wire is connected to though using unlinkp
This is handy if you want to modify or extend an existing config and still make the code a close to possible as it was in the beginning.

phillc54 wrote:

rodw wrote:

Well HAL is just like wiring too but some people complicate it with shortcuts to put more than one action on a line.

It is much simpler on one line, then it is just like a wire, it goes from here to there to there...

Our brains must be "wired" differently.

Some of the complex hal stuff I did preplasmac if you wanted to change things around it was much easier if it was all seperated out. So its just my rule to myself. I see a few other experienced guys doing it the same way I do.

Thank you both for the primer on HAL.

This should be an educational journey.