Memos From the Cube

So, a few new scraps of news on my end.

Firstly, there’s a new LUFA BETA out. This will the first release of 2010, and with the huge, huge increase in popularity of the last 091223 release, I want to make sure this release is as defect free as possible. To do that, I’m doing a full two-week beta cycle, where people are encouraged to download the beta code, try it out in their projects, and report back any issues (letting me know by email is fine too). This new code contains a bunch of neat things – see this discussion post for the changelog. Please try it out. Pretty please?

In other news, last week fellow AVR nut enthusiast Mike came over, to discuss his pet project, a LUFA powered HTTP client, using a common 3G wireless modem to pull data from the internet. I met Mike at last month’s AVRFreaks Melbourne meetup, where he showed me the current state of his project in an awesome demo done right there, wirelessly. I’ve since worked with Mike to clean up the code quite a lot, so that it is now in a state where people can actually read it, an attribute under appreciated in today’s society *grin*. We’ll be working on this a lot more hopefully in the near future, replacing the PPP layer with one from the Contiki project, and making it work with more 3G modems from other vendors. This is pretty cool stuff, as it opens up the door to future things like self-updating remote telemetry devices, with data being uploaded to the internet anywhere there is 3G access for only a couple of dollars each.

Finally, I went to my first Connected Community Hackerspace Melbourne meeting on Saturday, and got a great lesson in surface mount soldering (using the toaster oven method) from Michael, another AVRFreaks member from the meet up. We all got to solder three different sizes of surface mount parts ourselves on a test board, ranging from “Damn small” to “Goddam where the hell is it?” sizes. I think the most important lesson I learned that day was that yes, wind is in fact the enemy of SM electronics. Playing “is that a resistor or a chip crumb” with the others was certainly not something I would have predicted. Good times were had by all, and I look forward to future futile attempts trying to convert Ross over from the Teensy USB stack to my LUFA USB stack in the near future.

While the LUFA beta is pushed to kind testers, I’m still waiting on a package from the land of Uncle Sam, containing a custom AVR programmer board, and a bunch of TINY10 samples. Hopefully I’ll receive it and be able to complete my AVRISP-MKII clone project’s TPI programming support for the 100219 release deadline.