Memos From the Cube

Well, this will be my last blog post here in Australia for the next three months. Pretty darn scary; tomorrow I’ll be hopping on a plane alone and be whisked off to lands far away. It’s odd how you can talk about something in the abstract for so long to the point where it doesn’t seem real, and then find yourself just twenty four hours away from it becoming a reality. I’ve never been on my own before, and starting now in a foreign country seems like a worrying prospect.

That said, I’m still excited to go, and I’m now all prepared. The bags are packed (very close to the weight limits too!) and the details finalized, so I know I’ll be able to receive the required papers, accommodation, flights and phone calls I’ll need while in Norway. I’m damn excited to be stopping off in Amsterdam for a few hours; not for the infamous – to everyone but me apparently – Red Light districts, but so I can catch up for a little while with my friend Nard who I’ve corresponded with for the last few years.

I’ll try to keep a good travel blog while I’m over there, with pictures, movies and blog posts. I’m sure I won’t have something to report every day (everyone would be bored far too soon if that was the case anyway) but if you’re at all interested in Atmel/Norway life, check out my Internship Mission Control page for updates from time to time.

I’ve got some great new Micropendous boards a few days ago, but I’m afraid the post about those will have to wait both until I’ve looked them over a little better, and when I’ve got the go-ahead from Matt to announce them. There’s some interesting (for me) news in there too, which will brighten my day even if it won’t really affect those who buy the boards directly. Stay tuned for those.

In Arduino news, I was contacted last week from the great folks at Arduino, who asked me to look over the new Arduino Uno board firmware to find the source of the problems people have been having with the boards under Linux. I actually was completely oblivious to the issue since no one reported it to me directly (and I don’t currently own an Arduino board – but that will change soon) but once notified, I downloaded the source code and took a look. For those that missed the announcement a few months ago, the new Arduino Uno board has replaced the original board’s FTDI USB-to-Serial converter chip with an AT90USB82, using LUFA to perform the same job.

It turns out that the fix was rather, erhm, simple, and turned out to be just a single compile time option that was mistakenly disabled in the Arduino fork of the LUFA project it was based upon. Re-enabling that fixed things right up, so if you have an Arduino board, you should update your code via the USB AVR’s bootloader to fix the issues under Linux. The post mortem of the problem; under Linux, the virtual serial port would become invalid and unresponsive if the loaded “sketch” program on the board attempted to output a serial stream before the port became ready. Why was this a problem? The missing compile time option converted the USB Control Request Endpoint into an interrupt driven system, allowing for control messages from the PC to be processed even while the main line code was busy loading in received data into the virtual serial endpoint banks. Without the compile time option, the USB AVR would become stuck trying to send data to the PC and ignore the critical control requests it attempted to send to configure the virtual port on the USB AVR.

Since then the ever-amiable David has accepted a few other patches to the Arduino Uno codebase I sent in, which should also help with other corner case and performance issues. I’ll be able to work with the Arduino Uno some more while in Norway when I get my hands on one, so I can (possibly) improve the board’s performance and make some alternative firmwares for it for the other USB classes.

My next update with be from Norway, from the heart of Atmel!

UPDATE: We had some pre-Christmas celebrations and put up the tree early today since I’ll be leaving – I received this from my sister. Future webshop stock?