Memos From the Cube

Only six days released, and the new LUFA release has already got 133 unique downloads, not including checkouts from the public SVN and GIT source mirrors. Not too shabby for a niche project – each release only gets around 400 downloads total after a month, so at least takeup isn’t going backwards. Actually, one thing that is certainly going up is site hits in general, which is somewhat baffling since I only write junk here, and most of the content (save for new downloads) is entirely static. Here’s the site metrics since I started it:

Which, if this trend holds, means I’ll get 100% of all internet traffic by the time the sun burns out and becomes a dead star. I wonder what LUFA version will be out by then?

Actually, speaking of baffling LUFA related trends, I’ve noticed two others; since my mention in Elektor magazine, downloads of the November release have jumped quite a bit. Normally one would expect that if that’s the version the article was specifically targeting, but the article was about the September release. If people aren’t going to use the same version as in the article, why not use the latest?
The other trend was with the MyUSB downloads — that is, the versions of LUFA so old that they’ve grown mouldy and have been lost at the back of the pantry. The two year old 1.5.3 release has been downloaded 53 times this month alone, which leads me to suspect that people believe that LUFA and MyUSB are different projects. People! Not true! I’ve whacked an “obsolete” warning on the MyUSB downloads, just to drive the point home; MyUSB is simply the original name for the LUFA project. It’s not something separate at all, although it is old and manky.

On the Christmas front, I hope everyone had as much fun as I did. From my parents I got a new soldering station (which should encourage me to actually build something physical and permanent, rather than mucking around with prebuild boards/breadboards and concentrating purely on the firmware. From my girlfriend and her sister I got two totally AWESOME t-shirts. Here’s a picture of one of them:

That’s right. Wifi. Detecting. Shirt. Once University starts, I’ll be heralded as supreme alpha-nerd! The other t-shirt, alas, I cannot find a picture of, but it also animates and plays space invaders. Heaven.

I’m currently developing an extension to my open source AVRISP-MKII clone project (part of the LUFA package) which will give it support for the 6-pin ATTINY TPI programming protocol, just like the real AVRISP-MKII since the AVRStudio 4.18 SP1 release. TPI is actually very, very similar to the PDI protocol, which has greatly reduced the amount of effort required to implement it — in fact, much of the existing PDI code is shared. The trouble has been that Atmel won’t release the Host-to-Programmer protocol specs, so I’ve had to work it all out manually. Still, I’m now awaiting the arrival of some sample 6-pin AVRs to test it with, so it’ll be in the next LUFA release.

I’m actually floundering a bit for things to do with LUFA — while I’ve got a number of half-finished demos and projects left to do, the actual library core code is getting to be pretty stable. If you’ve got any ideas on where it needs improvement, leave a comment. I need some user-feedback and inspiration for working out what changes need to be made.

Everyone have a safe and happy new year. Onwards to 2010!