Memos From the Cube

I’m totally freaking out right now, and no, it’s not because of my exams next week. It’s because my Atmel internship is almost here! My flights are booked, my accommodation contract is nearly finalized, and in only a few short weeks I’ll be heading over for my first solo overseas trip. If anyone’s in the area of where I’ll be staying, give me a buzz since otherwise I’ll be stuck in a room by myself all day, and spending Christmas alone with nothing to do is just plain no fun. I’ve found that my dorm room will be equipped with high speed internet access while I’m there, so I’ll try to post updates about my internship – and my trip in general – rather than going radio-silent for three months.

It’s time for the third – and most likely final – beta of the upcoming LUFA 101122 release. This new release contains a big “gotcha” for those that don’t read the migration notes; the EVENT_USB_Device_UnhandledControlRequest() event has been renamed to EVENT_USB_Device_ControlRequest() which will break device mode operation for those not paying attention. This change isn’t just because I like being sadistic – it actually serves a purpose.

Some people have asked me what the “cleanest” way to intercept and alter incoming standard control requests – the ones normally processed internally in the library. Either they want to supply their own handler for specific requests to override the internal handler, or they want to be able to filter out requests and prevent the library from handling them at all. Before now the only way to do that was to resort to ugly hacking of the library core.

But no more. This event name change hints at the small underlying change I made to the event; it is now fired before the internal library handlers. That means that the user application now gets first dibs over control requests (regardless of how the request read was initiated) which means you can now filter and override handlers in a standard manner without special hacks. As a bonus, reversing the order this way also makes the compiled code very slightly smaller.

As always, thank you to the throngs of groupies people who have been kind enough to respond back with bug reports, suggestions, questions and donations. I don’t like sounding like a broken record, but suffice to say your contributions keep me motivated to keep coding.

One last quick thing to mention; LUFA now has a public Bazaar mirror to match the existing SVN, GIT and Mercurial mirrors. I know that people like to have personal choice on which client they wish to use for source control and project development, so hopefully these pre-made public mirrors will make life easier for everyone.

Grab the new beta via Google here.