Rabbit 2000 Systems

Introduction

The Rabbit 2000 is a highly integrated microprocessor from Rabbit Semiconductor. You can buy complete development kits from as little as $99, which includes a board with Rabbit 2000, RAM and FLASH, a prototyping board, Dynamic C compiler and IDE and a programming cable. I bought the first kit when it came out, but there are better ones now which include an RTOS and TCP/IP library.

These kits are a great way to build small microprocessor controlled equipment, without having to solder absoluely everything yourself. If you want to mess about with homebrew computers with a minumum of fuss I can recommend buying one of the kits, especially the TCP/IP version.

I have three systems, two BL1820 single board computers, plus a CM2020 core module. They all run versions of my command line interface (CLI) monitor, R-SYS. Dynamic C differs from regular C in a number of ways, and the IDE is quite usable, although I do have a number of criticisms:

There is only one source file, per project
Editor is a basic windows MDI application and has no syntax colouring as yet
Controlling the linker is pretty much impossible and fine details of bootstrap etc are abstracted. This is an advantage in some cases, but I found that it could impose limitations on the type of software you can write.
Tech support is not fantastic, but is reasonable given the generally poor standard of most tech. support.

These things aside there's plenty of good points:

Source level debugging and you can drop into assembly any time
Easy to in-line assembly language, particularly useful for the 20-bit addressing instructions.
Flash programming, download and debug via a serial cable, which gives similar functionality to J-TAG (TAP) emulators.

EEPROM Programmer

The most useful device in my collection is my EEPROM programmer, which is constructed from a Rabbit 2000 CM2020 core module and a prototyping board, connected to piece of stripboard which has a 24-pin socket for 2816 devices and a ZIF socket for 2864 devices. I can also use the sockets to check 2kB and 8kB SRAMs, such as 6116, 4016 and 6264s.

Some Pictures:

EP8000 EEPROM Programmer Mainboard, showing Rabbit CM2020 core module mounted on prototyping card

EP8000 ZIF socket board showing ZIF socket for 28 pin EEPROMs, plus a 24 pin 2k RAM/EEPROM socket.

Another Rabbit 2000 based system, this time it's a BL1820 Single Board Computer mounted in a small box. The eight LEDs,
visible at the bottom right of the picutre are just glued to the face plate and form a "service port"allowing low level diagnostics.
Communication is via the serial connector on the back of the box, through which you can expect an R-SYS prompt.