Memos From the Cube

WordPress is updated, and nothing’s blown up. Whee!

This evening I did something I haven’t done for quite a while, which might come as a shock to some egotists: I searched for references to myself and my past/present projects through Google. It’s quite an interesting trip down memory lane seeing how my contributions (I use that term very loosly) have spread out all over the web. More interesting is some of the more recent entries.

I am outraged to find that a guy has transformed my beautiful Simple Simon code into an abomination. It’s been ported for PICs. Good lord, strap on your helmets, because this world is going to hell in a handbasket. The Simple Simon code I wrote was actually very basic, and served to teach myself PWM and state machines — you can see the original, non PIC (bleah!) source here.

No no, I jest. I’m actually rather flattered that someone thought such simple code with such a simple purpose was worth porting to anything, and I’m a little saddend that there are no real-life pictures of the guy’s quite nice design, only drawings.

Also in my travells I found this blog entry, written by a guy experimenting with his own home-brew AVR USB boards and my LUFA (formerly MyUSB) library. According to that poor deluded fellow I’m a hero – a title shared with Smokey/Smileymicros/Joe Pardue at AVRFreaks – which is heartwarming to hear, if obviously untrue. Still, neat, and I enjoyed the semi-heart-attack I recieved from seeing delicate microcontrollers running from a breadboard sitting in a nice static-friendly plastic box.

It’s nice to see my name on the avr-libc contributors list, even for such small patches.  A while back I wrote the new ISR and Atomic block header files for avr-libc, which have been in the last few distributions. I actually think I made a mistake by making the new ISR macro backwards compatible with the old — if you haven’t seen the new functionality the extended macro offers, you really should read the header file’s documentation in the manual. Oh, and read the atomic block documentation as well, as it provides an ellegant solution to the age-long problem of atomic access.

Finally, on an unrelated topic – LUFA (formerly MyUSB) is now in Release Candidate stage – you’ve got a whole two days to alert me to any showstoppers before the next release. Essentially the code changes for the next release have been mostly wrapped up for a while, but the release has been delayed by me wanting to finish documenting each individual demo. Nuts to that I say, as the new changes are worth getting out there now, so I’ll be releasing the next version (now versioned by release date, rather than an arbitrarily increasing number) in the next few days with all the projects and demos documented, but only the device mode demos (minus the RNDIS demo) documented.

Don’t delay – grab a copy of the new version’s RC and get testing!