Re: [avrdude-dev] avrdude GUI with Fuse Calculator

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Andreas Weber wrote:

> Mark H. (http://palmavr.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/fc.cgi) and I
> discuss if we should program a FLTK GUI for avrdude with Fuse bit
> calculator (similar to his online version). The emphasis should be
> to calculate and program the fuse bits, not to up- or download the
> firmware.

I'd kindly ask you to reconsider that somewhat, and try writing a full
GUI that completely integrates into avrdude, rather than yet another
frontend.  Some time ago, I restructured the avrdude source code to
clearly separate the backend code (that now goes into an internal
library) from the frontend code (the classic CLI main.c).  One of the
major ideas behind that was to make it easier to write a different
frontend, based on the identical backend code the command-line UI
uses.

The major advantage of that is that it will automatically ``scale''
with avrdude: new devices will always be added to everything as a
whole, rather than trying to catch up after each release only.  Also,
it will constitute a uniform utility to the user that way.

Jörg Lachmann, the original author of avrdude-gui (who later abandoned
the project due to lack of time) once already toyed with the idea to
rewrite it completely using FLTK.  So perhaps you might even try
discussing all that with him, and see whether he'd like to comment on
some things.  After all, he's at least once tried already, and perhaps
got his experience to share so you don't have to repeat some of his
earlier mistakes.

> My question is now if some facts of the case from 2005 has changed
> or where we could get the fuse bit information NOT reading all the
> datasheets individually. Or is it legal to write a xml converter
> tool which extracts only the fuse settings?

That's exactly the way Atmel suggests.  They don't allow copying these
files verbatim into an open-source project, but they explicitly allow
picking up all the information one needs from it.

Btw., if you opt for an integration into avrdude rather than a
separate tool, this would probably require to store the fuse
information inside the avrdude configuration.  The current size of
avrdude.conf bothers me, it's approaching half a megabyte already.
Also, the current structure shows some significant shortcomings in
other areas as well: the flat name space has caused arbitrary naming
in certain areas, just to distinguish e. g. the different poll
timeouts used within certain contexts.  So some kind of restructuring
appears to be overdue.  I'd like to know about other developer's
opinions on that.  Ideally, I'd like to at least see it split into one
file per AVR part, and maybe one file for the rest, or even one file
per supported programmer as well.  The idea to use XML files rather
than plain text files is also tempting, given that many of the modern
programmer parameters are to be extracted from Atmel's part
description XML files anyway.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)