Stephen's Weblog

Here’s the first installment of my weekly project report thing :) Wish me luck!

So, not terribly long ago I decided it was really time to give microcontrollers another go; My history with microcontrollers in general has been a little sketchy, because not only are they pretty limited systems, but they don’t really allow a lot of creativity in solving your problems. Being mostly self-taught on ARM and x86 CPU architectures, the little 8-bit uCs generally seemed more like a pain than anything else.

However,  I was determined not to let my history deter me, and to try again. I ordered some AVR DIP chips for prototyping and a serial programming cable. Unforuntately, like so many well laid out plans, this didn’t wind up working out – not knowing too much about the AVR landscape, I had inadvertently ordered a serial programmer that requires an actual native serial port to work (it wouldn’t do anything with my USB-serial converter… And seriously, who has a native serial port around these days?)

Being incredibly stubborn and unwilling to  wait further to order yet another programmer, I decided to take matters into my own hands – After reading the AVR documentation on programming their chips (which is actually quite good), I put together a small CPLD based programmer which has served my needs. Read on for the full details…

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The first project I’m going to use this “system” for is a set of testing apps for DS, primarily to verify emulator correctness. The project page is at http://wiki.akkit.org/Nds_test_apps. The page itself describes the project pretty well, but here’s a quick summary:
Two applications for DS will be written, one is a Graphics test, one is a CPU/Memory test. The idea behind both, is to evaluate the correctness of emulation for all graphical and CPU features, and periodically release the applications and information about how well the emulators do in the tests in order to promote improvements in emulation.
This project is nice in that it’s easy to add more users to the development without people stepping on each other’s toes, so I’m happy to add several more people to the project.

Not all of the framework is in place for this project yet. I have a Subversion server and a bugtracker that are both partly ready, I expect to have both of them running correctly soon – they’ll be responsible for making this teamwork possible.
The code for this project will be closed source during development, until a certain level of completeness is reached (this has yet to be decided) – after which point, all the code will be released under the MIT source code license (this, too, is just the current plan, if the team has other ideas, it can change)
We will release binaries periodically, to allow people to test on their own, and to allow emu authors to get a good look at what problems exist.
If you would like to be involved with this project, please email me at sgstair [at] akkit [dot] org.

So, this apprentice thing hasn’t exactly been working out the way I expected it to… The second exam, while a neat idea suffers from a few fatal flaws.
Firstly, I’ve been lazy, and when not lazy, I’ve been wrapped up in a multitude of other things. The second problem I come up with is trying to write a test like this without it just becoming more about “what I know” than about actually teaching people. Lastly, the type of people I would want to target are exactly the sort of people who could learn all this stuff on their own, without a test to verify their knowledge – just given the right direction to look for information in.

So, here’s the plan: I’m dropping the apprentice idea. If you wanted to be involved and wanted to learn something, you’re still welcome to ask me; I’m still interested in answering questions and pointing people in the right direction.
I still have a number of projects going on, and I would still like to allow members of the community to be involved with them, and I will still have high entry standards for joining such projects.

I’ll post on this blog when I have projects going on; I have one now (that I’ll post right after this post). If you want to be involved in a project, email me: sgstair [at] akkit [dot] org.
My criteria for allowing people onto projects is going to be entirely subjective, but things that I expect from people who are interested are: a good knowledge of C/C++, some understanding of the workings of the DS, and some understanding of how to write secure code. Other requirements will be present for more complex projects, of course… and some of those will be starting eventually.

Also, to all of you who participated in the first round of the apprentice exam – thanks! Sorry it didn’t go further in that form, but if you’re still interested.. that’s what this is for! I’m presently hesitating to send out the “results” of the first round, mainly due to the high subjectivity of my ratings; however if someone convinces me otherwise, I might reverse my position. I do hope to get to work with some of you in these coming projects :)