Latest revision as of 21:16, 17 January 2017

After you have installed BASCOM, you will find a program entry under MCS Electronics\BASCOM-AVR

The following window will appear. (If this is your first run, the edit window will be empty.)

The most-recently opened file will be loaded automatically. Like most Windows programs, there is a menu and  a toolbar. The toolbar can be customized. To do this, place the mouse cursor right beside the 'Help' menu.

Then right-click. You can turn on/off the toolbars or you can choose 'Customize'.

This will show the following window:

You have the option to create new Toolbars or the reset the toolbars to the default.

To place a new button on a menu bar, select the 'Commands' TAB.

In the example above, the Program Category has been selected and at the right pane, all buttons that belong to the Program-category are shown.

You can now select a button and drag & drop it to the Toolbar. To remove a button from the Toolbar, you drag it out of the Toolbar and release the left mouse button.

On the Options-TAB you can further customize the Toolbar:

To preserve screen space there are no large icons available.

The Editor

The editor supports syntax highlighting. Code you enter can be reformatted automatically.

When you press CTRL+J you can select a template. A template is a small piece of code that can be inserted automatically.

When you press CTRL+J you can select a template or you can type the template name and press CTRL+J. If there is only one template starting with that name, the template will be inserted. Otherwise the options are shown.

Templates are stored in the file bascavr.tpl

When you press SHIFT and move the mouse cursor over a variable, constant or other element you will get a tool tip with info.

In the sample above the variable 's' was selected and the tool tip shows that it is a string with a length of 16 bytes in the modules crc8-16-32.bas

This functionality only works when the Code Explorer is shown. This because in order to get the data info, the project code must be processed on the background. This processing is only active when the Code Explorer is active.

Intellisense

The editor has built in intellisense.

It is important that your code contains the $REGFILE directive like : $REGFILE = "M88def.dat".

When you press CTRL+SPACE you get a list of statements, sub routines, functions, labels, asm registers, etc. This list depends on the place of the cursor in the code.

- At the start of a line you will get a list like : . You can select a value from the list and press enter to insert it into the code.

- When you type a letter of some letters like pr  Here you can see the position is set to the first item that starts with PR  : PRINT

- After PRINT when a variable is expected :  Here you get functions, variables and constants

- After CONFIG  Here you get a list of all CONFIG statements.

- After CONFIG param (the = sign).  Here you get a lost of parameter values.

- After GOTO, GOSUB  Here you get a list with labels.

- After CALL  Here you get a lost with sub routines.

- Inside $ASM-$END ASM  Here you get a list of ASM mnemonics.

- After ASM mnemonic  Here you get a list of registers.

PLEASE NOTICE : intellisense is considered a beta function in 2079. It is subject to change.

                     : values for CONFIG might not be shown. This is because all these values need to be present in the DAT files. And each processor has specific options.

Select Text

Selection of text can be done by double clicking the text, by holding SHIFT down and moving the cursor or you can select a block of text by pressing the ALT key and dragging the mouse cursor.

TABS

When you have loaded multiple files, each file will be shown in a TAB. The active TAB can be closed or dragged to a new position. When a file is modified the TAB caption will be shown in red.

When you move the mouse cursor to the TAB caption you will see the full path of the loaded file.

Custom Configuration

You can load a custom configuration file by specifying the filename as a parameter.

This allows you to run different versions of the software with different setting/option files.

The configuration file has the XML extension. It can be found by clicking the XML data folder link in the Help, About window.

By default bascom uses the file : \Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\MCS Electronics\bascom-avr.xml

When you want to use a custom file we would recommend to store it in the bascom-avr application folder. This way you can run multiple versions of bascom, all with their own settings.

When a file named bascom-avr.xml exists in the BASCOM-AVR application folder, this file will be used for the settings. By default this file is stored in the users profile folder. You can find it by clicking Help, About, XML data folder link.

When you store this file into the BASCOM application folder, you can use multiple versions with multiple configurations.

A suggested setup for working with multiple versions would be :

c:\APPS\BASCAVR\2079  : for the 2079 version

c:\APPS\BASCAVR\2080  : for the 2080 version

Please note that this options is implemented in version 2080 so it will not work in prior versions.