Memos From the Cube

I’ve long been grumbling (privately) over the lack of LUFA exposure “in the real world” – it’s been my heart and soul for quite a while now, and while there has been some truly fantastic works of engineering art come out of it, quite frankly it’s a very niche product destined to be used by engineers alone.

Until last week.

Boy, did I not see that coming. In my last post I briefly mentioned that the PSGroove project, an open source Sony Playstation 3 jailbreak firmware for the USB AVRs, was released – and it used my LUFA project s its base. At the time I thought it was a neat application of LUFA, and sure to be of some interest to gamers and developers alike, but not much more than that. Before I go on, I’ll stress that the original PSGroove code did not allow for game piracy, only the execution of homebrew (unsigned) code – something I support entirely.

But I certainly never imagined the sheer overwhelming interest in Matthias’ work. Within hours news was all over the internet, and I was pulling in more downloads of LUFA and hits of my site than I normally get in months. A quick search for PSGroove on Google yields 230 thousand freaking hits. I’m happy I’m able to have a minor role in this, as I’m totally chuffed that thousands of people all around the world will be using a LUFA powered project in their own homes.

What was most bizarre for me was that for the first time in my life people actually cared – in real time – what LUFA development I did. After pushing a minor patch for the LED and button support to the Olimex AVR-USB-162 board (which is a piece of junk in my opinion I might add, since my board died after the first program I loaded onto it for testing) I woke up to find posts of people discussing it and posting patched PSGroove HEX files.

Here’s what being in the limelight does to my server:

And I’m not alone on this – people truly have gone totally nuts. One of the consequences to all this is that every single bleeding USB AVR in the world (which were already in short supply) have been snapped up, either by board houses trying to pump out some boards to sell to gamers as quickly as possible, or by the gamers themselves as pre-made development boards. Great for them, but I do feel for the hobbyists, developers and board houses now scratching their heads wondering what to do now that they don’t have any chips to put into their already designed product X. Hopefully this will spur Atmel not to neglect the production of the USB AVRs, so it might actually mean a more plentiful supply in the future as Atmel manufactures another batch.