freemcan is software for using custom gamma spectrum analyzer and geiger counter hardware. It consists of both the firmware to run on the custom hardware and of hostware to run a Linux PC.

As the custom hardware contains a high voltage generator, we have not published the schematics or board files for its hardware yet.

• We wanted it to be Free Software.

• MCA is the acronym for Multi Channel Analyzer which is the common term for the device.

• "freemca" produced a few hits on Google. "freemcan" did not. Brand name collision wise, an unused word appeared to be the better choice.

(FIXME) No plan.

For a reasonably quick build, we recommend a parallel build:

$ make -j -O -l 5

Otherwise, you can build serially with

$ make

Installation is not supported at this time.

• GNU make

• avr-gcc based AVR toolchain

• avr-binutils >= 2.19 (we use INSERT AFTER in linker scripts)

• POSIX/GNU/Linux/Unix host system

• gcc compiler for host system

For building the internal code documentation (mostly of interest to freemcan developers), you additionally need

• doxygen

• graphviz

• sloccount

  Optionally, for creating the source lines of code (SLOC) summary.

TBA.

LGPLv2.1+

• firmware/

  The device firmware for Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller

• code-comparison/

  Some common tasks our firmware needs written in portable C and compiled for all platforms we have a cross compiler for. This lets us compare the assembly language generated for those platforms.

• hostware/

  All the software running on the PC host. For lack of a better word, we called it "hostware" to distinguish it from the "firmware".

• emulator/

  Simple attempt at emulating the device connected to a device file by having an Erlang program connected to a Unix domain socket.

• cbi/sbi do not modify SREG. That makes it easy to write an ISR without saving any registers, like e.g.:

  foo_vector:           /* enter ISR: 5 clock cycles */
          sbi foo,bar              /* 2 clock cycles */
          reti          /* leave ISR: 5 clock cycles */
  

  for doing the reset timing stuff, potentially at ADC trigger, and after timer IRQ counted delay later, or similar stuff.

• ccache is known to not generate the *.i and *.s when called with the -save-temps=obj option. Until your local ccache has been fixed, set CCACHE_DISABLE=true or remove /usr/lib/ccache or /usr/lib64/ccache from the PATH as a workaround.

  The same issue applies to other files like linker map files (-Wl,-Map=$(@:.elf=.map),--cref) and assembly listing files (-Wa,-adhlns=$(@:.o=.lst)).