So, with that in mind, add me to Skype! I’ve thrown a link and status information onto my contact page, so that people can instantly see if I’m around. Some times I’m at Uni or busy with other things, but if the status is green, click away! I’ve already had an interesting chat with Andrei from Russia, which marks my first international call – my original 2 minute call of garbled audio to an awesome lady named Lydiah in Africa from having not enough bandwidth several years ago doesn’t count.

Oh, and thanks for the interesting comments to my previous rant on the state of USB VID/PID pairs – seems I’m not the only one fed up with it and I was interested to see other’s solutions. I’ve got another rant in mind about the USB class codes which I’ll write up in the near future, with any luck. Some things just need to be said, whether anyone bothers to read it or not.

Note that this value is unique for a particular product, not device — each device can optionally have a unique serial number, but the VID/PID alone simply identifies to the host what the device is (e.g. “Happy Fun Technologies’ USB Webcam Model E123″). The problem with this is that for such a scheme to work, you need the USB-IF to act as a central registry for VID values, so that no two manufacturers release products to the market with the same VID/PID pair.

This is a problem only because the USB-IF charges companies out the rear for a VID value. Each VID value grants a company the ability to make a full 65,536 different USB products, which is a good thing — but it means that tiny businesses with only one or two products get shafted, since they’re stuck picking up the tab for a large keyspace that they simply don’t use. While 65,536 products is a lot for a single company, having only 65,536 different VIDs available means that most of the possible VID/PID combinations are wasted.

A few years ago, some smart businessfolk came up with a good idea; pony up the US$2000 or so per year it takes to secure a VID, and then resell the PID values to private buyers in small blocks. That was great for them and great for the buyers, since they could sell blocks of 10 or so at a reasonable price, and small companies could then use the purchased PIDs in their small line of products. Unfortunately, the USB-IF, never one to be cheated out of milking developers dry, threatened to sue all such resellers, and attempted to retroactively add in a clause to their license preventing resale.

So where does this leave us? Up the USB creek with no VID/PID. If you’re not interested in having full USB-IF endorsement (and the rights to use the USB logo on your products, etc.) you can still find people willing to resell you a PID block who bought a VID from before the license was updated. You could also bite the bullet and fork over your first-born – plus around US$2000 – to the USB-IF to buy a whole VID. Other options would be to ask your USB chip vendor, as some such as Microchip and FTDI will hand them out for free to customers requiring them. Finally, you could purchase a license to use a USB stack where the vendor has bought a VID, since in that case you’re buying the rights to use the stack, and just get the PID “for free” as part of the deal.

Do I find it ironic that people are forced to buy a license to a software USB stack implementation, just so they can bin it and just use the included VID/PID combination with the completely free LUFA stack? Yes I do. Am I grumpy about it? Yes I am. The USB-IF’s daft implementation of the VID/PID combination scheme has brought untold irritation to developers worldwide. Had they used a GUID implementation like Microsoft uses (where there is no need for a central repository, as the keys are partly time based and the key space is massive) or even a reliance on unique vendor/product descriptor strings we wouldn’t all be in this mess.

So go forth people, and source your precious VID/PID. Just make sure you tell the USB-IF how unhappy you are about the situation, regardless of how you obtain it.

Now that I have a Linux machine going with native USBTMC drivers and nothing much else to do, I want to go ahead and complete a device class driver for it. However, my last roadblock is finding some free Linux software which I can use to evaluate my class driver. I don’t care what it is – just as long as I can load it in Ubuntu, and have it connect to my custom USBTMC driver device so that I can send and receive messages to confirm that it works. Some sort of visualization would be even better, so I can report voltages from the ADC and display them to the host as a demo application. I’m at a bit of a loss as to what I can use however, so now I turn to the general community. Can someone point me in the direction of some suitable software?

University starts for a new semester tomorrow, so my holidays are now officially up for a while. Boo.

You should also notice that the page degrades perfectly; if javascript is disabled, you just get static text of the latest donor. This is done via a server-side PHP script which caches the pledgie JSON code every 20 minutes, and which inserts the latest donor into the page when it is retrieved from the server.

Now, what else can I stuff into this thing?

Hi, my three week old laptop’s hard disk has died. When turned on, the BIOS does not detect any disks on the bus, and it emits a horrible screeching sound when the disk tries to spin up. Where should I ship it to for a warranty replacement?

And a day later, got back a message asking me to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows, to see if that is at fault. Yes, I realize they’re just monkeys with a giant keyboard full of macros with labels like “Reinstall Windows“, “I’ll need to elevate your request” and “Sorry, your 12 hours warranty expired yesterday” – but still, why haven’t they been replaced by a knowledge-base and a smaller set of competent engineers? It turns a simple warranty replacement problem into a multi-week saga.
You know what? Screw it. It’s Acer. The same monkeys who held my *brand new* netbook for a month of its 12 month warranty, for a simple noisy fan replacement. Nuts to them.

Yesterday I went to a Connected Community Hackerspace meeting, where I got to meet “the REAL geek squad” and showed off my LUFA powered Webserver. As is the case with all public demonstrations, the first 20 minutes was comprised of me swearing while trying to get my JTAG to connect to my USBKEY, until it spontaneously fixed itself and all was well. I’ve handed off my donated ARM7 board to the much capable Angus (hoster of this website, in fact) so that he can set up an environment for me so that I can actually use it.

On and a special mention to Michael McKenzie and Dave Fletcher, who donated AU$1 and AU$0.1 respectively. With PayPal fees, I’m now $0.67 richer!

LUFA 100219 is released, the first for 2010! This new release contains a corrected AVRISP programmer project (now with TPI programming support for the TINY10 and others), a new TemperatureDataLogger project which logs temperatures to the dataflash’s FAT partition via the FatFs project (something that’s been requested from me quite a lot), a new uIP powered Webserver which can connect to any RNDIS compliant device and serve out pages, and a million tiny bugs fixed.

I’m hoping the new “complete projects” I’m adding will give inspiration and instruction to those wanting to use LUFA – they’re similar to my demos, but have a specific application in mind, and are a little more complete/complex. I think it’s important to have both the simplified demos showing off a single concept, as well as the larger project showing how to accomplish a specific goal.

As I said above, LUFA looks to be petering out; I can’t think of much more to do other than flesh out the documentation. I will be experimenting with CDC-Ethernet soon (the standards compliant way to get Ethernet through USB, instead of Microsoft’s proprietary RNDIS class) but other than that, it’ll probably be mostly bug fixes from here on out. Here comes the hard part – trying to thing of a new project to do!

As always I’ll put the full changelog at the end of the post. Please try to use the Google Code primary mirrors where possible for the actual release downloads, to spare the server bandwidth.

Thank you all once again for your continued support, contributions, and complaints.

LUFA 100219 DOWNLOAD PAGE

=============================

New:

• Added TPI programming support for 6-pin ATTINY devices to the AVRISP programmer project (thanks to Tom Light)
• Added command timeout counter to the AVRISP project so that the device no longer freezes when incorrectly connected to a target
• Added new TemperatureDataLogger application, a USB data logger which writes to the device’s dataflash and appears to the host as a standard Mass Storage device when inserted
• Added MIDI event packing support to the MIDI Device and Host mode Class drivers, allowing for multiple MIDI events to sent or received in packed form in a single USB packet
• Added new MIDI send buffer flush routines to the MIDI Device and Host mode Class drivers, to flush packed events
• Added master mode hardware TWI driver for easy TWI peripheral control
• Added ADC MUX masks for the standard ADC input channels on all AVR models with an ADC, altered demos to use these masks as on some models, the channel number is not identical to its single-ended ADC MUX mask
• New Webserver project, a RNDIS host USB webserver using the open source uIP TCP/IP network stack and FatFS library
• New BOARD value option BOARD_NONE (equivelent to not specifying BOARD) which will remove all board hardware drivers which do not adversely affect the code operation (currently only the LEDs driver)
• Added keyboard modifier masks (HID_KEYBOARD_MODIFER_*) and LED report masks (KEYBOARD_LED_*) to the HID class driver and Keyboard demos
• Added .5MHz recovery clock to the AVRISP programmer project when in ISP programming mode to correct mis-set fuses

Changed:

• Slowed down software USART carried PDI programming in the AVRISP project to prevent transmission errors
• Renamed the AVRISP project folder to AVRISP-MKII to reduce confusion
• Renamed the RESET_LINE_* makefile tokens in the AVRISP MKII Project to AUX_LINE_*, as they are not always used for target reset
• Changed over the MassStorageKeyboard Class driver device demo to use Start of Frame events rather than a timer to keep track of elapsed milliseconds
• Inlined currently unused (but standardized) maintenance functions in the Device and Host Class drivers to save space
• The XPLAINBridge project now selects between a USB to Serial bridge and a PDI programmer on startup, reading the JTAG port’s TDI pin to determine which mode to use
• Removed the stream example code from the Low Level VirtualSerial demos, as they were buggy and only served to add clutter

Fixed:

• Fixed AVRISP project not able to enter programming mode when ISP protocol is used
• Fixed AVRISP PDI race condition where the guard time between direction changes could be interpreted as a start bit
• Fixed ADC_IsReadingComplete() returning an inverted result
• Fixed blocking CDC streams not aborting when the host is disconnected
• Fixed XPLAIN board Dataflash driver broken due to incorrect preprocessor commands
• Fixed inverted XPLAIN LED driver output (LED turned on when it was supposed to be turned off, and vice-versa)
• Fixed Class Driver struct interface numbers in the KeyboardMouse and VirtualSerialMouse demos (thanks to Renaud Cerrato)
• Fixed invalid USB controller PLL prescaler values for the ATMEGAxxU2 controllers
• Fixed lack of support for the ATMEGA32U2 in the DFU and CDC class bootloaders
• Fixed Benito project not resetting the target AVR automatically when programming has completed
• Fixed DFU bootloader programming not discarding the correct number of filler bytes from the host when non-aligned programming ranges are specified (thanks to Thomas Bleeker)
• Fixed CDC and RNDIS host demos and class drivers – bidirectional endpoints should use two seperate pipes, not one half-duplex pipe
• Fixed Pipe_IsEndpointBound() not taking the endpoint’s direction into account
• Fixed EEPROM and FLASH ISP programming in the AVRISP project
• Fixed incorrect values of USB_CONFIG_ATTR_SELFPOWERED and USB_CONFIG_ATTR_REMOTEWAKEUP tokens (thanks to Claus Christensen)
• Fixed SerialStream driver blocking while waiting for characters to be received instead of returning EOF
• Fixed SerialStream driver not setting stdin to the created serial stream (thanks to Mike Alexander)
• Fixed USB_GetHIDReportSize() returning the number of bits in the specified report instead of bytes
• Fixed AVRISP project not extending the command delay after each successful page/word/byte program
• Fixed accuracy of the SERIAL_UBBRVAL() and SERIAL_2X_UBBRVAL() macros for higher baudrates (thanks to Renaud Cerrato)

Thank you to everyone for supporting me over the last few years!

A bit of jQuery study later, and the LUFA download page has the downloads separated by age – newer ones are immediately visible, older releases are available via a toggle button so as not to clutter the page too much. Of course, it degrades nicely for those not using Javascript, just like the rest of the site. I’ve also combined the LUFA download links into single lines, giving the primary/mirror download links as well as the documentation links.

I’ve just released BETA2 of the 100219 LUFA package, ready for testing. This package contains a bunch of fixes, and TPI programming finally works in the AVRISP-MKII package!

In any case, you’ve no doubt noticed the completely new uniform theme on the site, with the new seamless blog integration. I’m a terrible web-developer, but I think the new design is much more accessible and less, well, ugly. Don’t worry, the page and download URLs should remain the same between versions for my projects.
Like the new site? Hate it? Suggestions on things to add, remove or alter? Post here, so I can work out what changes still need to be made to make FourWalledCubicle better than ever.

EDIT: Thanks to Ian Banks for the new totally awesome site logo!

Firstly, there’s a new LUFA BETA out. This will the first release of 2010, and with the huge, huge increase in popularity of the last 091223 release, I want to make sure this release is as defect free as possible. To do that, I’m doing a full two-week beta cycle, where people are encouraged to download the beta code, try it out in their projects, and report back any issues (letting me know by email is fine too). This new code contains a bunch of neat things – see this discussion post for the changelog. Please try it out. Pretty please?

In other news, last week fellow AVR nut enthusiast Mike came over, to discuss his pet project, a LUFA powered HTTP client, using a common 3G wireless modem to pull data from the internet. I met Mike at last month’s AVRFreaks Melbourne meetup, where he showed me the current state of his project in an awesome demo done right there, wirelessly. I’ve since worked with Mike to clean up the code quite a lot, so that it is now in a state where people can actually read it, an attribute under appreciated in today’s society *grin*. We’ll be working on this a lot more hopefully in the near future, replacing the PPP layer with one from the Contiki project, and making it work with more 3G modems from other vendors. This is pretty cool stuff, as it opens up the door to future things like self-updating remote telemetry devices, with data being uploaded to the internet anywhere there is 3G access for only a couple of dollars each.

Finally, I went to my first Connected Community Hackerspace Melbourne meeting on Saturday, and got a great lesson in surface mount soldering (using the toaster oven method) from Michael, another AVRFreaks member from the meet up. We all got to solder three different sizes of surface mount parts ourselves on a test board, ranging from “Damn small” to “Goddam where the hell is it?” sizes. I think the most important lesson I learned that day was that yes, wind is in fact the enemy of SM electronics. Playing “is that a resistor or a chip crumb” with the others was certainly not something I would have predicted. Good times were had by all, and I look forward to future futile attempts trying to convert Ross over from the Teensy USB stack to my LUFA USB stack in the near future.

While the LUFA beta is pushed to kind testers, I’m still waiting on a package from the land of Uncle Sam, containing a custom AVR programmer board, and a bunch of TINY10 samples. Hopefully I’ll receive it and be able to complete my AVRISP-MKII clone project’s TPI programming support for the 100219 release deadline.