Woot! I won a couple prizes for the Sponsors' contests! Thanks HaD, Microchip, and Freescale!

Finally got the 'heartbeat' code running with the 'tcnter' (on the PIC32)...

'tcnter' implements a long-duration high-accuracy timer without necessitating interrupts. I use it for timing the heartbeat to 8 seconds per fade-in/out cycle and one second per blink. I also use it as the timing-basis for *several* other commonThings, including bit-banging of UARTs, etc.

So, basically, the idea is that once the heartbeat is running with tcnter, it means serial-communication is coming soon.

Embedded-project-development-wise, that's the path... and, in general, going from nada to heartbeat to bit-banged serial, and beyond is a matter of a few hours' work. This time, not so much... There's been a bit of a learning-curve with this PIC32/MIPS system... and, more importantly, a lot of work on #commonCode (not exclusively for AVRs) ... It's that "not exclusively for AVRs" part that's being improved significantly as part of this process. New ideas on how to decouple the system from the architecture even further... Better documentation, whatnot... It's a daunting amount of work, we'll see how it goes.

Basically, as-of little more than a few months ago, I seldom looked at commonCode as a project of its own... it's always been developed/improved as a result of some other project[s] that makes use of it... I'm actually quite amazed at how much I accomplished that way, as looking at it *directly*, now, seems like a *huge* undertaking.