Memos From the Cube

I’ve caved. I’ve started to write my own book on USB communications, focusing on the Atmel USB AVR line of microcontrollers. No idea how it’ll turn out, but it should be fun either way. The end result should be easy enough for competent AVR programmers to use – since the USBXXX AVRs cover the physical USB layer transparently, the book can skip over all that to reduce confusion. I’ve posted a thread on AVRFreaks about the book outline, so post in there if you want your voice heard!

I got an email from a Stefan Salewski PHD (read: much smarter guy than I) who informed me about his own GPL USBXXX driver. Check it out here. It lacks a lot of the features that MyUSB has, but produces much tighter code due to being a bare-bones approach.

Yesterday I received my brand new RZRAVEN boards, courtesy of Atmel. Unfortunately, like so many others, my units came with broken speakers; good thing Atmel says they’ll be working on ways to prevent such problems when the kits start shipping. No firmware available for the boards yet, so I’m restricted to playing with the default firmware. I’ve already added the RZUSBSTICK board to the MyUSB library, which was a very easy task due to the lack of peripherals on the board and the fact that it’s based on the AT90USB1287 AVR.