Memos From the Cube

It’s a cliche, but for me it actually applies. Gentlemen, the future is now!

I’ve just bought a nice new Toshiba Satellite 201/O2H notebook to replace my dying less-than-two-year-old heap of junk Compaq Presario M2000V. Let this serve as a warning to others; DO NOT PURCHASE COMPAQ LAPTOPS. Screen issues (vertical lines, anyone?), design issues (overheating) and other problems are well known in the HP/Compaq brand.

The new Toshiba came with Vista, which is my first proper experience with the new OS. I sat down being fully prepared to hate it as numerous others already do, but I’m very pleasantly surprised. The new features are fantastic, and a year’s worth of patches/fixes and such has resulted in quite a nice new OS. It’s not without its problems - I had to reinstall the webcam drivers and fix a problem in the registry preventing the system tray icons from appearing - but all in all, I’m very impressed.

Everything just seems to work, and work well. I’m a little worried that my years of computing experience will be of no use in the next few years; with parts replacement as easy as ever and auto-configuring systems, there’s little call for someone who knows how to repair OS components. However, it’s all in the name of progress and I support it wholeheartedly.

Being able to control and dictate to the entire system with the inbuilt speech recognition is very, very cool.

I’ve just released version 1.0 of my MyUSB (name now finalized) library. It’s complete enough for general consumption, with the only real missing parts being the OTG code and the porting to the AT90USB82 and AT90USB162 microcontrollers. That will be completed at a later stage - for now, I’m happy enough for the library as it stands to be used by the general public.

Please email me with any questions, comments, anecdotes, ideas or bugs with the library.

Until I get my hands on a second USBKEY board, work on MyUSB is just about stopped. Apart from a few finishing touches (such as better error register retrieval API) the device and host modes are complete, with only the OTG section left to code. Also needed to do is the porting of the library to the smaller AT90USB162 and AT90USB82 AVRs, however as they are not derived from the same dye as the AT90USB128x and AT90USB64x, this is a little difficult. The smaller USB variant AVRs have a significant number of differences to their larger cousins, which means the port will require lots of datasheet study. I also don’t have any example chips to test out such a port, making me wary of releasing any untested library modifications.

It seems more people are viewing my MyUSB project than my ButtLoad project - that’s great news! I’m happy to see people interested in the project. Remember to contact me if you end up using the library, as I’m eager to hear what it’s being used for!