Today has decidedly been an interesting day…one where no matter how much I wanted it, a device simulator was simply not going to do…real hardware reared it’s ugly head and I had to break-out the oscilloscope.

You would think that a small PIC processor running at 8MHz would be able to handle the requirements for the Dallas 1-wire bus.  It worked just fine with the serial-to-1-wire converter we use. Unfortunately, hooking it up to our embedded controller caused the integration blues to burst on the scene.

Our controller uses a Dallas (now part of Maxim) DS2482 to do the interfacing from the processor to the 1-wire bus.  That device definitely has its quirks!  The trouble we ran into: the DS2482 has much faster transitions than the converter we were using for design.  Turns out it was too fast for our 8-bit processor!

5 different permutations of assembler instructions later, the problem was fixed. And you think software is a handful! Hah!  But this is what makes embedded a challenge!  Do you have what it takes?