Bit position to bitmask conversion using MPASM directives

Question

I'm writing firmware for a PIC16F877A in assembler, and I want to set some constants at the top of my source code to indicate which port is used for what, so that if needed I can easily change all the i/o pins around by changing the constant values and recompiling.

Like this:

O_LEDS EQU PORTA
CONSTANT O_RED = RA1
CONSTANT O_GREEN = RA2
CONSTANT O_BLUE = RA3

In my code, I need a bitmask to represent the ports I'm using. My question is, how can I write an expression using assembler directives to calculate the bitmask?

Using my example above:

O_RED = 1
O_GREEN = 2
O_BLUE = 3

and the bitmask I want is:

movlw b'00001110'

If there was a to the power of operator, I could do something like this:

movlw (2 ^ O_RED) | (2 ^ O_GREEN) | (2 ^ O_BLUE)

but ^ in MPASM is a Bitwise exclusive OR, not to the power of.

Can anyone think of another way to do this?

Answer 1

I haven't used MPASM before, but does this work?

movlw (1 << O_RED) | (1 << O_GREEN) | (1 << O_BLUE)

Shifting to the left doubles a number.

1 << x == 2^x

• BG100: ah yes!!! I can't believe I didn't see that myself. Thanks.