ButtLoad 3.0 Release
Well, ButtLoad 3.0’s finally out the door. It’s been a heck of a long ride for this project, and it’s certainly helped develop my coding, troubleshooting and design skills. I’m quite amazed that people all over the world use ButtLoad on a regular basis!
ButtLoad 3.0 took a very long time to finish, partly due to the major changes but also due to apathy and frustration at being unable to debug the thing. User’s can’t possibly fathom the amount of hair and sanity I’ve lost over the past few months getting the thing in a working and publishable state. The new non-consecutive HEX file support is actually the second generation, with the first being the reason for the delay; my original implementation was fast and clever, but too clever for me to debug it. What was that old quote again? Ah yes:
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian W. Kernighan
How true, especially in the embedded world where clever code is required to fit in with the minimal resources avaliable.
In any case, it’s now done and ready for public consumption. Please do notify me of any bugs you find – which there will undoubtedly be plenty! – in the AVRFreaks thread about the project.
ButtLoad’s now pretty close to what I had in mind when I first started the project, thus I feel comfortable with stopping its development for the moment (save for bug-fixes) while I pursue other projects.
