Memos From the Cube

Some of you might be expecting something a little different here – I mentioned on my Twitter feed of my plans to write up my current tiny side-project (no hints here, either read the feed or be patient and all will be revealed) however I’m still trying to track down a small bug in it, so I thought I’d delay the post about it for now. Instead I bring good news; a new LUFA release!

This one is far, far overdue, but what with my month-long holiday back home, my recent move to a new apartment up in the mountains things got a bit behind. Actually, I was waiting for something else before I pulled the trigger; the release of the public Atmel Studio 6.1 beta.

The AS6.1 beta has a lot of the usual backend and front-end fixes, support for new devices…yadda yadda, you know the drill. However, it also brings support for something called the – well, uh, I’m not sure exactly, since it’s changed names internally half a dozen times – but I’ll call it the XDK since that’s the last monkier I heard for it. The XDK allows developers to package up your Atmel Studio 6.1 projects into dedicated extensions, so you can distribute them on the Atmel Gallery. It’s a little limited for now with plans for future expansion, but the important thing is that it’s given me the infrastructure I needed to finally offer a native LUFA extension.

That means no more crazy manual exporting and importing of the LUFA core, or trying to figure out what project options need to be set – all the demos and projects, as well as base templates, are made available as example projects, just like ASF. Configuration of the modules is done through the ASF wizard as well, so changing your board, device and adding/removing LUFA code modules can all be done through the GUI. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a start, and I’d love for some public feedback from the new release package.

In any case, I’m not going through with a normal two week beta cycle for LUFA-130303, since the trunk code has been stable for some time now and pretty much continuously tested by myself and the community over the last few months. As a result, I feel very confident in going ahead with a full stable release immediately.

The Changelog for the new release is available here, and the new release downloads can be found here.