Official statement regarding the K42 and K83 family issues

[filip]

To our forum users and customers,

In the past months, you were reporting various issues regarding the usage of the K42 & K83 families and our compilers.

We have carefully read and examined each of them, reported it to our development and management team, and now we would like to make an official statement regarding this situation.

What exactly is the issue with the PIC compiler and K42/K83 families ?
1. Registers for indirect addressing, such as FSR, TBLR, etc. are located in the 63rd memory bank resulting in the compiler’s miscalculation of the addresses, so the code that uses indirect approach does not work.
2. Support for Interrupt Vector table for K42/K83 families was not implemented, only the the legacy interrupt approach was supported.

Which compilers suffer from these issues ?
All three PIC compilers (mikroC, mikroPascal and mikroBasic PRO for PIC ), version 7.20, don't work correctly with K42/K83 MCU famillies and we don't recommend their usage when dealing with them.
Instead, we encourage our users to use the beta version.

Which problems will be addressed in the beta version ?
1. The compiler will now take into the account that aforementioned registers are located in the 63rd bank,
2. IVT table will be supported in the beta version.

When will be the beta version available ?
We will do our best to release the beta version by the end of the December 2018.

Mistakes in the release process
1. These errors shouldn't went unnoticed and unattended during the compiler's design and testing process.
2. The solution should be available much sooner, and our users should not wait this long for a working compiler.

Lessons learned :
This situation caused us to think deeper and change the whole compiler release process, adding auxiliary measures that will prevent delivering a non-satisfactory compiler release.

These measures include :
1. Updated release process;
Release process will now take much more care when supporting a new family, to counteract any potential problem that was not covered in the existing release process.

2. Resurgence of the compiler's beta testing program;
The beta testing concept was proved to be an excellent choice - our users had a preview of the following official release and could test it at the same time, which in turn resulted in a stable release and raised confidence in our development.

3. Introduction of the Premium Technical Support Service;
There were many suggestions from our users who pointed out the benefits of having some sort of subscribed technical support.
Therefore we acknowledged this suggestion, as it can lead to a much faster solution of the reported issues.

Extras
Users who first identified these issues and pointed out the culprit will be granted a Premium Technical Support Service in one-year period.

Regards,
Filip Jankovic, Support Department Team Lead,
Ivan Rajkovic, Head of the Software Department.

[filip]

Hello,

The long awaited 7.3.0 beta compiler version for the PIC architecture is finally here.

Although we have announced that it should be available by the end of the 2018, we have slightly postponed it due to the unforeseen additional testing.

The download links for 7.3.0 beta version can be found below :
https://download.mikroe.com/setups/comp ... a-v730.zip
https://download.mikroe.com/setups/comp ... a-v730.zip
https://download.mikroe.com/setups/comp ... a-v730.zip

We await your feedback on the official beta testing forum sections :
viewforum.php?f=85
viewforum.php?f=91
viewforum.php?f=86

Regards,
Filip Jankovic.