Memos From the Cube

Although making it comes close! I’ve been doing a few minor jobs for a new (to me) company this past week, and it’s been quite fun — nice to be actually earning rather than spending for once. I’m currently on my end-of-semester break from University, which has given me plenty of time to pursue work and have fun from a change free of stress.

ButtLoad continues to roll out, with around 80 downloads. I’ve always wondered just how many people in the world are using it; it’s a delicious feeling to know that somewhere in the world someone completely unrelated, and who I may never meet, has been impacted by my work in some way. An even better feeling is the lack of any complaints so far, so I hope that means the code’s working for the majority.

Have been working on MyUSB. The USB protocol/interface is really interesting, although I’m yet to really scratch the surface. I’ve got a test application set up, displaying the position of the joystick onto the two USBKEY bicolour LEDs - all via the MyUSB library, of course - while looking for a successful USB device enumeration via a seperate task. I just hope my efforts pay off and I get a twin green LED indication (USB connect successful) in the next little while…

I’ve updated the MyUSB download on my site, although the version is staying at 0.0 until some real developments occur. The USB code is essentially non-existent at the moment, but downloading it will at least give an idea of the library, and the other drivers are working and documented.

Like the original Atmel driver, I’ve written my own “scheduler” for the library, to make coding easier. It’s really just a round-robbin loop, but with a few small twists. The scheduler keeps track of elapsed delays via a a tick counter (which is incremented in the test application every mS) which can then be used to delay the execution of tasks for a certain duration via the Scheduler API. Tasks can also be disabled and enabled on the fly, which makes it slightly more versatile. I’ve got no plans to make a proper RTOS at the moment, although it may be possible for the future as it’s a rather interesting project.