Made By Monkeys

Engineers buy and use development kits and evaluation boards to minimise their risk and speed the design cycle -- many say they expect to get something working on a new board in a mere 30 minutes or less. So when the documentation sucks, often contradicting itself or leaving out critical details, it can be insanely frustrating. And it's especially wrenching when the hardware is interesting and useful, as engineer/writer Jon Titus recently discovered trying out a new microcontroller dev kit from Freescale.

"I have a Freescale kit here that could let engineers compare performance of
8- and 32-bit MCUs in the company's new Flexis family. The same code should
run in either processor type, which sounds like an interesting capability
for engineers. But the written instructions are so awful many engineers
will give up. And, nowhere in the instructions does the kit explain its
purpose or provide examples readers can use to compare performance, code
size, and other characteristics for each of the two processor types.

Design engineers often complain that development kits that rely on a host PC provide no isolation. The resulting ground connection between the dev kit and PC can wreak havoc on the dev kit and, worse yet, fry your PC.

Jon Titus, who blogs over at EDN's new DEVmonkey site and has used and reviewed plenty of dev kits in his day, describes the problem and suggests two solutions for frazzled engineers trying to track down elusive grounding problems:

"Take a look at a galvanic isolation device [Jon suggests two options] for the USB bus. Such devices optically isolate the PC side of the USB bus from the application side and eliminate most grounding problems."

Jon Titus, Senior Reviews Editor over at the DEV-monkey site, is one of the most knowledgeable editors (and engineers) around on development kits and tools.

But even experts can always use more help, as he points out in a recent blog post about the dev kit phenom he calls "Getting thrown over the cliff." Better yet, he offers vendors ideas on how to improve the usefulness of their kits.

"Often when I complete work with a development kit, I feel as though its vendor has led me to a dead end where I face an abyss. Most instructions lack a final warning, such as, "Good Luck. You're now on your own. Few of even the best dev kits explain what to do next with software tools or hardware. Maybe they assume after you work through a simple code-and-load example, you're an "expert." But because developers may have bought a dev kit to learn about new tools and hardware, manufacturers should assume buyers and users are NOT experts. Even the smartest engineers need some help now and then."

Judging by the responses from readers, they clearly agree.