Cheshire Engineering Corporation

Free Stuff

From time to time Cheshire finds that a utility developed to solve some internal need may be of more general use. Some of these are available here for you to have if your find them useful and productive!

DocTree folder documentation tool

DocTree is a utility written in Lua to report on the content of a folder tree. The report is written in HTML, and contains a section for each folder in the tree listing the files and folders found in that folder.

In addition, folders may have annotation text that is included in the report. The annotations for a folder are stored in a file in that folder, so that the annotations naturally stay with the folder and are likely to survive manipulations such as ZIP archival, version control systems, or even simple file system moves and renames.

DocTree has its own page with more information, links to the installer and source code, examples, and a manual.

Async event catcher control for the IUP GUI toolkit

The IupAsync control is presently an alpha release proving the concept for the Windows platform only. It is intended that it be ported to the other platforms supported by IUP (GTK and Motif for Linux and OSX).

Version 0.3, released December, 2008. iupasync-0.3.zip (144KB)

IUP is a portable user interface library from the Tecgraf group at PUC-Rio in Brazil. It is small, lightweight, and well-integrated with the Lua programming language (which is the more famous product of Tecgraf).

IUP is not designed to be accessed from multiple threads, but occasionally there is a need (especially in a multi-threaded application) for the UI to update a display or dispatch an action in response to messages from other threads or from an OS component. To address this need, we designed an IUP control that translates calls from any application thread into a callback function guaranteed to be running in IUP's thread.

The IupAsync control is open source and is released under the same license as IUP and Lua, a close relative of the MIT license.

MicroC/OS-II port to the Motorola Coldfire MCF5307

Version 1.01, released March 23, 1999.

Click here to get umcf101.zip (PKZIP archive, about 25 KB) containing the port files and a simple example program. Unzip the archive in your \SOFTWARE directory to add MCF5307 and ex_mcf subdirectories to your existing uCOS-II installation. See the encosed README.TXT file for more information.

This is our port of Jean Labrosse's fine, inexpensive RTOS to the Motorola ColdFire MCF5307. Get his book MicroC/OS-II The Real-Time Kernel from R&D Books to get the C source to the kernel itself.

This port is based on a port to an earlier version of MicroC/OS to a 5200 family CPU by David Fiddes.

This is the first public release, so please test everything before you depend on it, and expect to see announcements on the ColdFire mailing list of any updates.

Feel free to use this port if it is useful to you. We do ask that you let us know of any bugs you find (or even better, fix) so we can update the distribution. The bottom line is that we are placing no real restrictions on use of this port. Cheshire needed the port for a project, but since it was based on David Fiddes' work, we're happy to provide it to the ColdFire community for the good will. Of course, Cheshire will be happy to discuss your ColdFire (or other) embedded system design projects since embedded systems design and consulting is what we do!

AutoPlay icon AutoPlay Settings

Note that AutoPlay Settings is of much less utility in versions of windows newer than Windows 2000.

Version 1.0b3, released October 3, 1997.

Ever inserted a CD under Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 and had it unexpectedly load and run some random application?

Want to take back some control over your disk drives?

Then this small tool is for you. AutoSet 1.0b3 (aset10b3.zip, PKZIP archive, 100 KB) allows the user to manipulate the obscure value in the Windows Registry which controls the AutoPlay (sometimes called AutoRun) feature.

To install it, just download the ZIP, extract the two files into some directory, and run AutoSet.exe. If you like, make a shortcut to it in your Start Menu/Accessories folder.

AutoPlay is a new feature of Windows 95, which became a part of Windows NT with the release of version 4.0. AutoPlay causes some programs to launch "automagically" when the appropriate disk is merely inserted in the drive. When it is expected, it can be a great boon. However, there are times when it is annoying to have programs starting just because they want to.

You could tell if a disk is designed for AutoPlay by looking for a file named autorun.inf in its root directory. If one is there, then it describes the actions taken automatically when the disk is opened. Of course, you have to open it to look to see what will happen if it is opened... :-)

AutoSet works by manipulating the registry value named NoDriveTypeAutoRun, which is usually found in the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Exporer.

Neuralyst Demonstration Edition

Note that Neuralyst requires Excel 2003 or earlier on Windows PC, and that Neuralyst is no longer available for sale.

Free Neuralyst Demo. Try out a free copy of the demonstration edition of our Neuralyst for Excel product.

Neuralyst for Excel is an add-in for Microsoft Excel which simulates a neural network to find patterns in hard to analyze data.