ANT: a brief presentation
ANT is mainly intended for development of single and/or networked microcontroller systems mased on ATmega328 and ATtiny2313.
Each micrcocontroller is a node with unique address in a network. One and only one microcontroller is the Master Network Controller (MNC). All other microcontrollers are Slave Neworked Devices (SND).
What is especially useful in ANT is tha fact that a personal computer can act as MNC.
When the network is created, all microcontroller must run a minimal system (ANT System Monitor Code, or SMC) The master can employ the network protocol for altering the program memory of any connected device.
User can develop programs for the target microcontroller with minimum “interference” form the SMC. In a networked system SNDs will mostly perform elementary and/or time sensitive operations. At present we expect routines to be run inside any SND to be written in assembler. The MNC will typically handle interaction with humans (GUI) and it will be, in most cases, a PC or a single board PC with a high level operating system.