The process of design requires research. This can be as simple as internet searches or as complex as taking a college class. Research can be as general as looking for or at similar designs or as specific as what wiring pinouts are needed for the design. The completeness of the research needs to be weighed against the time and effort necessary to reach that level of completeness.
Running simulations and building prototypes are often a good level of completeness as long as the design has built in margins around specified results.
A programmer that supports most of devices should have JTAG capability. From research, I found that JTAG was designed for testing, most systems that have JTAG implement a programming interface as part of the JTAG connections. I am not expecting to support JTAG testing or debugging, but it might be a possibility.
I’m not a programmer or developer, Steve. Not even close. But I’m thinking about studying basic PHP. Would that be valuable in a project like this? Or is PHP capability becoming old-style and not really applicable anymore?
By the way … I love the way you think. It is helpful seeing the processes you go through along the way.
PHP might be useful on the user interface side, but not on the programmer interface side of the project. PHP was developed to handle the ambiguities of the web. Programming a microprocessor has no ambiguity. So PHP would probably be the wrong language for this purpose. My first language of choice for the programmer internally would be C. Which is a great language for getting down to the nuts and bolts of the processor with enough abstraction to simplify most tasks.
PHP is still being used on web servers all the time, it is used as the back end handling the website traffic. I am unfamiliar with trends associated with web server architecture and so unqualified to answer your question concerning it’s relavance.
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