BASCOM-51

Till now, the BASIC-52 interpreter was the only choice if you want to run BASIC on the extremely popular Elektor Flash Microcontroller Board (described in the December 2001 issue). Fans of the BASIC programming language will like to hear that there is now a powerful alternative called BASCOM-51.BASCOM was originally developed by Mark Alberts and his Dutch company MCS-Electronics (www.mcselec.com) for the AVR series of microcontrollers from Atmel. Later, a spinoff called BASCOM-LT was marketed specially for the smaller controller type 89C2051. This eventually led to BASCOM-51 being developed and sold for the beefed up derivates of the 8051. The MCS-Electronics website has available a free download of the BASCOM-51 demo version. This version allows programs with a size of up to 2 kBytes to be developed. This may not seem a lot but don’t be fooled because the compiler is very effective at generating code!