Memos From the Cube

MyUSB 1.5.3 is well under way, with a release due exactly “when it’s done”. I don’t believe in setting concrete release dates and then either kill myself trying to meet a arbitrary deadline, or release substandard code. Until there’s a reason to fix a release date (e.g., for projects funded/contracted out by others) I’ll continue to try to release when I feel the current code base is ready.

To that end, the focus of the next release is mainly standards compliance. With all the noise I’ve made in the past (both on my blog, elsewhere and to my friends — forgive me Alan!) about forcing a painful death to all those who deviate from the standards, I’ve since discovered through use of the USBIF compliance tool quite a few bugs in the MyUSB library and demos’ implementation of the USB and class standards. This next release will hopefully fix that, with all devices now passing the Chapter 9 request compliance tests, and the HID demos passing the HID class tests. Mass Storage has a little way to go, with code needed to handle the infamous “thirteen cases” of wonky requests to the device. Once all the demos pass the relevant standards tests, 1.5.3 will be released.

The next MyUSB release will contain two “new” demos, which are actually just modifications of the current demos. The first is “KeyboardMouse”, a dual HID interface demo implementing both Keyboard and Mouse features to show off multi-interface single class devices. The second is “DualCDC”, which uses Interface Association Descriptors I wrote about previously to implement two independant CDC virtual serial ports in the one compound USB device.

On that note, I want to thank everyone who has contacted me about the library so far - knowing people are using it motivates me to keep improving it. I really appreciate the emails I get when people passionately describe what widget they are working on based on MyUSB. The latest email I’ve received is from Matt about his new AVRopendous project, a darn cheap open source/hardware AVR development board with a twist. The twist is a literal one, with the board mouting 90 degrees (perpendicular) to a breadboard, for easy prototyping. Matt’s promised to send me a couple in the mail, so I’ll be writing more about them when I get my hands on them. Assuming they arrive in the next week, it’ll be the first non-AT90USB1287 powered device I have to test out the library on, so I can ensure future compatibility with the smaller USB AVR range.

My thanks to everyone who has donated to me so far. University is a full time commitment, so the only work I can do is small contract jobs. Having people donate to show their appreciation helps me out quite a bit. Actually, I think that making the library MIT licensed was a great decision, as it helps get my name out in the wild for future jobs.

A few days ago, I recieved word that the Bluetooth organization has released their specifications publicly for free, rather than to members-only (which it used to be, as far as I can remember). I’ve downloaded the Bluetooth 2.0 and the Bluetooth USB transport standards, which I’ll hopefully be able to implement on top of MyUSB. Commercial Bluetooth modules are usually either raw HCI or fixed Serial class only, and are frightfully expensive, while HCI USB dongles are only $4 or so each. If I’m able to create a Bluetooth stack that runs on the USB AVRs, this will drive down the implementation cost to under $10 or so per unit and (as an added bonus) the resulting device will not need to undergo any wireless testing as the pre-tested and sealed dongle would be used as-is. Once I start on that, I’ll branch it off as a seperate project that ties into MyUSB and make it GPL, with alternative licensing avaliable for a small one-time fee.

As a final bit of news, last Fridat I purchased a legitemate license of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate (RRP ~AU$1300) for the princely sum of AU$79. I actually REALLY like the updated ribbon interface, as it makes every task easy to find and use, unlike previous versions. The special University student-only offer was first made avaliable last year over at It’s Not Cheating, but I missed it the first time. Checking back last week shows that it’s once again back on, so I bought a license key. If you are an Australian TAFE or University student, you are most likely elligable, so go grab it before they kill it off again!

Actually, if one was not clued on to these things, one would dismiss the site as a scam, due to the stupudly low price and the currently non-functional “Click here for proof” link. Microsoft’s really boned it by not fixing up the site so that it provides adequate verification, but last year when the site was first up it had all the proof one needs (including a page on the official Microsoft website about the offer and the site). The proof is still available on the Microsoft site - but now one has to search for it manually rather than clicking the link on the purchasing site. At any rate, other than the dumb form only showing US states and not Australian states, it all works like a charm and now I’m the proud owner of the latest version of Microsoft Office.

Interesting week, last. I received in the mail a nice package from Donald Delmar Davis containing two of his “DorkBoard” and three “Benito” boards. The former is a very nice looking “bare bones” MEGA168 board for rapid firmware development, belonging to the “Adurino” movement which has been getting a lot of press and popularity these last few months. I’m actually quite thrilled by Adurinos, as it is *very* nice to see an AVR based design being placed into the hands of potential engineers and hobbyists rather than overpriced, underpowered, PIC based BASIC stamps. Bleah.

The board is an unusual blue color, which I rather like - it’s a nice change from the standard copper-on-green PCB that is the norm. After I manage to get a hold of some surface mount discretes, I’ll be making them up to play with.

The Benito boards are what really capture my attention however. While I’ve been reading up on Donald’s project over on his blog (including the posts about using it for its original purpose of an Adurino board programmer as well as recently a USB to Serial dongle and a USB to SPI/ISP programmer) I never really appreciated one critical aspect of the design, how damn small it is. Seriously, these things are only a tad smaller than Smiley Micros’ aptly-named USB Thingy (itself about the size of a thumbnail), which is a FTDI based USB to Serial converter, yet are incredibly flexible due to being AVR rather than proprietary chip design based.

I’m currently looking for a cheap source of three AT90USB162 surface mount ICs so I can get the boards up and running, since purchasing them from places such as Digikey are very expensive for only a handful of parts. If you have two or three of these lying around and are willing to sell for the right price, please contact me via email or leave a comment.

I’ve only done one surface mount board in my life, so the Benitos scare me. However, the best way to practice is to do it and do it repeatedly, so these should be a learning experience in more ways than one.

I’ll post photos of the boards when I can figure out how to get the camera set up for macro shots when I get home tonight. For now, check out the Dorkbot PDX site for photos of the boards, or (even better) buy some yourself.

MyUSB now has a seperate bug tracker set up, for reporting MyUSB bugs and feature enhancement requests. This is to complement the general project support and discussion group I set up last week. Please use the tracker as much as possible, so I don’t miss or forget your requests and bug reports!

As always, I’m certain I’m forgetting some piece of recent and exciting news. Stay tuned for more when I inevitably remember what it was.

Thanks to all who’ve been sending me word on where MyUSB is ending up. I really get a kick out of seeing it incorporated into some very interesting projects, and I’ve been adding links to the projects I know of on the MyUSB project page.

Congratulations to Sean D’Epagnier for getting his Magnetometer mouse sold on Sparkfun. Sean was kind enough to send me a free unit partially for my help getting the MyUSB powered portion of the device working, and partially so I could test out the device in the sothern hemisphere. I posted a small rundown of the device previously, but go check it out again if you missed it the first time. It’s quite a neat product, and works a little like a tethered Wii controler, in that roll, pitch and yaw of the device controls the cursor on the screen.

I was alerted yesterday to another project built with the MyUSB library, however unfortunately for me the site for it is written in German. A quick Google translation later and I now have the jist of the project - it’s a 868MHz wireless protocol analyzer powered by an onboard AT90USB162 AVR microcontroller. I haven’t the faintest idea what the 868MHz band is used for, so if you are more clued in than I, please leave a comment.  The dongle looks quite professional, and no-doubt is being heavily used by whoever it is that uses 868MHz communications. I look forward to being illuminated on its exact purpose.

I’m also pleased by the number of members who have signed on to the new MyUSB Support Google Group in the last week. There’s already been a bit of good discussion about the project (or topics related to MyUSB in some way) so I do suggest that all those interested come and join in — you might learn something!

Currently in my idle time at University between classes I’m investigating Ray Tracing, by writing a simple ray tracer in Java. Once I get my spheres lit by some proper lighting via rays traced from the primary ray/sphere intersection I’ll post some screenshots. For now, it’s just a lot of uninteresting multicoloured spheres.

It’s late at night, so I’ll be brief. I’ve just created a public Google Group for MyUSB related support, over here. All users are welcome, and all MyUSB-related discussions are allowed, so please come along and join, and ask any MyUSB related questions you like! This way all previous discussions I have with users will be archived for all to see and participate on, so that I don’t end up repeating myself over and over.

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and join already!

I found an interesting presentation today from the “Sketching in Hardware ‘08″ conference, something of which I’ve never heard before. I find the presentation interesting for many reasons, but one of them is definitely the mention of MyUSB - and there’s a nice looking USB board in the presentation too, which presumably uses MyUSB (since the library is mentioned). It’s nice to see even a little momentum being built up about MyUSB, as the more people using it the happer I become.

Since he seems to be bursting at the seams, I’ll also put another mention to Casainho’s Bicycle POV project over on Google Code. While the use of MyUSB is ancillary (used as a command and data transport from the host) the project itself is quite spectactular, and the latest pictures of the finished prototype boards are top-notch. All the best to Casainho, and I only ask that he take a picture of the final design showing a MyUSB/FourWalledCubicle themed picture ;).

Actually, It’s been an interesting week. On Sunday night I battled over timezones with another user, to help him get the MyUSB Mass Storage demo working on his custom AT90USB162 board. It turns out I’ve done the dumb thing of making the endpoints in the demo double banked (why do I keep doing this?!) which doesn’t work in that situation on the AT90USB162. Writing demos that work across the full USB AVR range is difficult when I only have an AT90USB1287 handy, but hopefully that will change in the near(ish) future and I’ll be able to fully test out the demos.

In lieu of payment for my assistance on Sunday, the user has agreed to send me a few of his custom boards. The boards themselves are (deliberately) simple - they’re actually business cards which will have my name, contact details, website and the like printed on them, with my resume and a few odds-and-ends located on the card’s dataflash, accessable when plugged into a computer over USB. It seems like a rather cool idea in my mind — a business card where the firmware of the board itself is an example of my skills — which is why I agreed to grab a few. Now all I need to do is figure out what to put on the card’s 1MB of space, other than my resume, picture and contact details. I’ll post pictures of the cards when they arrive, but the user should be posting his own information about them on AVRFreaks soon.

It also seems that the MassStore demo is broken on XP, but not for the usual reasons. The demo itself works fine as a disk — but Windows XP refuses to format the dataflashes if they’re not already formatted (which they are from the factory on Atmel’s demo boards). This is due to XP requiring the implementation of a few SCSI commands marked as non-mandatory, which nevertheless cause problems if not present. Fortunately I have backups of the old code in my local SVN and was able to re-implemented the needed SCSI commands, which are simple dummy handlers anyway.

This semester we’ve move on from blasphemous TI microcontrollers into the exciting world of CPLDs. That means I now have to learn the VHDL language, something I’m already hating. VHDL, in my experience, looks like the illegitemate inbred offspring of C, BASIC and Delphi. So many well established syntax patterns are broken in the language it makes my head hurt, and my body wish for a more C-like language for the chips.

Two days ago I received in the mail a nice shiny new toy, courtesy of Sean D’Epagnier over at www.digitalsurveyinstruments.com - a new magnetometer/pointer device. Powered by MyUSB, this little critter can serve either as a “3D mouse”, where the computer’s mouse pointer moves according to the rotation of the device, or as a magnetometer sensor which can collect readings for curiosity, amusement and (possibly) legitemate survey uses.

The design and quality of the device is top-notch, and it’s a blast to play with - although not without the occasional bug as the system is still in development. I’m quite excited to play with a real, proper design made from MyUSB, and all the more excited about just how damn neat the thing is.

Sean’s been busy working on both this and the larger, full magnetometer design, with mountains of firmware to dig through on his site along with schematics, documentation and a host-side communication program. Following the lead of other designers the unit can be put into CDC mode, enumerating as a virtual serial port for terminal-like control over the settings and status of the device through either Sean’s custom program, or through a standard serial terminal. This flexibility allows other software to interact with the device easily through standard serial APIs, which makes porting or creating compatible programs a much easier task than a custom USB interface with custom driver would afford.

I haven’t had much of a chance to really play with this thing yet other than use it to control my mouse and surf the web, so it’s going to be a fun couple of days.