Memos From the Cube

Well, my adapters have arrived for my USBKEY. They’re so tiny - only seeing them “in the flesh” gives the full impact of just how tiny these things are.

Above is Tom’s photo of his USBKEY, with the adapters mounted. When I have some spare time I’ll be mounting them on my own board, which will make development considerably easier. Having access to a standard pin header for each port means easier interfacing with external devices, like the Trackpad I bought a few months ago (see earlier blog entries) and the as-yet unannounced new “toy” I received.

Actually, I can’t wait for the “toy” to be officially announced so I can blog about it, it really is quite neat. I’ll be writing some nice open source drivers for it in the future, that’s for sure!

I’ve managed to get a few Uni friends interested in my Space game framework, and we’re now all busy working on coding AI modules for it. Very hard, but forces some interesting new thinking patterns and coding styles.

On the projects side, two tid-bits of news worth noting. One, it seems that ButtLoad is incompatible with AVRDude’s signature check. That’s rather strange, as the signature check works fine in AVRStudio, but one of the forum members might have found a reason - the two programmers use different methods to determine the signature. Current analysis points to a bug in ButtLoad’s “SPI Multi” command handling, which is entirely possible due to me being unable to find any programming software that made use of it to test it out. Expect an update on this issue here in the future.

Second item of note is a small update on MyUSB. Development is still underway as always, if a little slow while I wrap my head around a few Host and USB related concepts. I’ve started to move around some of the device code and filenames, to make it consistent with the new Host code.

MyUSB needs a proper name about now, before it gets too embedded. If you can think of a more interesting (and unique) name for the project I’d love to hear from you.