Ed Sutter has worked with embedded systems for about 15 years, and over the last few years has written code to boot dozens of differing hardware platforms. Those platforms ultimately hosted VxWorks, Nucleus, pSOS, uC/OS, and other embedded operating systems. In an effort to avoid continually reinventing the wheel, Sutter decided to develop a common boot platform for embedded devices: MicroMonitor. Now, his employer, Lucent, has granted him permission to post it on Lucent's Software Distibution Website for free public download under the Lucent Public License.

MicroMonitor provides many of the usual features found on CPU evaluation platforms, but in addition includes a Flash File System (FFS), TFTP client/server, XMODEM, DHCP/BOOTP, and several other valuable features for today's intelligent interconnected embedded devices. In addition, files can be compressed, there's an onboard ascii file editor, and it provides support for automatic power-safe Flash defragmentation.

The MicroMonitor download package includes a full set of source code, descriptive html pages, and tools that provide an embedded system firmware platform that can be used on a wide range of architectures. The majority of the code is CPU and platform independent and has been used with a variety of different embedded operating systems. “During the process of porting MicroMonitor to MIPS, PPC, SH2/4, 68K, ARM, Coldfire, and x86 it has been flushed out quite well to keep the non-target-specific code common,” observes Sutter.

“A common boot platform is something that this industry just has not gotten around to doing,” says Sutter. “My monitor package [helps address] this issue.”

 
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