Hardware Configuration panel: specify the external interfaces of the system! Below you see a screen shot of the 68HC11AE target's Hardware Configuration panel. After having selected the target-platform you are going to use, this is where you go to specify the interfaces you wish to use. Each pin can be clicked, after which it shows a drop-down list with the functions/protocols it can support. The available functions depend on the pheripherals provided by the microcontroller/hardware-platform and the built-in libraries provided by the XPad-target. Examples are: I2C SDA and CLK lines RS232 TX and RX lines 1Wire (Dallas) dataline Output Pulses LCD datalines (HD44780 based) Analog input Discrete input Discrete output By means of a "Bus Id" pins can be combined into a single multi-pin protocol. (I.e. the I2C SDA and CLK pins have the same Bus Id number). These Bus Id show up in your model as Bus-variables, which you can simply pass to the built-in libraries to generate the correct signals, without you having to border about the pins ever again. If you change your mind about the pin-assignment, all you have to do is to re-assign the pins and use the same Bus Id for the new combination. Your model will automatically use the new setting during simulation and compilation! Furthermore you can specify some global platform-dependent information here, such as: crystal frequency (the built-in libraries will automatically adjust their timing accordingly); memory map information (location of RAM, ROM, Stack, etc) . After submitting your specification XPad evaluates the validity of your configuration and returns feedback if a problem was detected. Alternatively each target comes with a wizard, which can do the configuration for you. In the wizard you indicate, which interfaces you need and the wizard will generate the pin-assignments and Bus Ids!