UPDATE: DMCP-3.10 / DM42-3.10
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 2:20 pm
This latest update to both the DMCP and DM42/Free42 parts of the DM42's firmware brings the following improvements:
- Intel® Decimal Floating-Point Math Library Version 2.0 Update 2
- "Print to file" feature
- Calculator help file updated
- Fixed the issue with multi line messages and menus
- Off-images with flipped row order are accepted now
- New toolchain and speed boost
An update was released a few months ago (see https://software.intel.com/en-us/articl ... th-library) and has now made its way into the DM42's firmware after the required testing.
"Print to file"
This feature allows you to "print" data to a virtual printer and to recover the results in a text file deposited in the FAT drive.
Graphics output uses pseudo-graphic "block" characters that will really only make sense if the text is viewed with a fixed width font.
The new feature is fully described in the updated manual.
Help file updated
The built-in help file has been updated to reflect the new features of the DM42. You can grab a copy of it from here
Multi-line messages and menu
A bug prevented menus from updating their contents properly when multi-line messages were displayed. This has been fixed.
Reference: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1960&p=8758#p8758
Off-images with flipped row order
Some bitmap formats invert the order of the rows in them, ie. the bottom row appears first in the file. The DM42 would choke on these.
This is now fixed and both variants of .bmp file can be used.
New toolchain and speed boost
We've updated to the 2018q2 release of GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors.
The problems with some of the build optimisations that caused instability in the DM42 using an earlier version of this toolchain have been resolved, which has allowed us to switch those optimisations back on. Having performed extensive testing of the resulting code we found no instability whatsoever but we did notice a speed gain of around 5% in calculations. This could, of course, also be partially down to the newer version of the Intel library.
Bottom line, this build of the DM42 firmware is faster than V3.9 and also smaller in size, which means that there's more room for future enhancements
The method for updating your DM42 is covered in the manual.
The latest firmware binaries are available here.
SHA1 checksums:
- f5a0faa32ccfeacd641c7ce0d4d5e34433aad4d2 DM42-3.10.pgm
- 10691156542d090257a950867930742b0a042c37 DMCP_flash_3.10.bin
- 7ec2f2449f7f47dc5b8685acac6b8261827b578a DMCP_flash_3.10_DM42-3.10.bin