What is Reads51?
Reads51 is “Rigel’s Embedded Applications Development System for the 8051.” It is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Rigel Corporation has been building industrial OEM products for over 12 years. In the early days the engineers found the software development tools to be expensive, inadequate often buggy. Although primarily a hardware company, Rigel started writing its own “in-house” software tools. Later, as Rigel began producing evaluation boards for major microcontroller manufacturers, it began including its IDE with the hardware. The first truly integrated environment was released for DOS more than a decade ago. Rigel views its IDE as a “baseline” IDE that comes with the hardware. It illustrates how the Rigel boards may be used. The emphasis is on user friendliness and richness of examples, not generating optimized code. Reads51 is not intended as a competitor to the many truly advanced development systems in the industry. As more educational institutions began including e
