Re: [avrdude-dev] GUI development

[Bob Paddock]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:30:27 -0400, Sumeet Pal Singh  
<address@hidden> wrote:

> I am student in IIT Kanpur in India. Just today I heard about Red Hat
> Scholarships 2005-2006 The Lord of the Code contest and I thought why not
> develop the gui for avrdude.

> Can someone tell me where is I can find the code for the gui developed  
> until now and how can I contribute.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/avrdude-gui

It uses the wxWidgets cross platform kit.
http://www.wxwidgets.org/  By using that you will have an application that
will work for your Red Hat contest, as well as an application that will  
run on
several other systems, such as BSD, MAC, and Windows.

AVRDUDE is great for the development environment as it stands now, being  
command line based
you can run it from Makefiles and Script/Batch files.

But something I would like to see is true integration of the GUI into  
AVRDUDE.
The reason for this is to make the GUI version more useful in a production  
environment,
as it stands now the GUI is intended for people that know what Flash,  
Fuses, etc are,
and the handling of errors returned from AVRDUDE to the GUI is a bit weak  
(this is the main
problem with the GUI/AVRDUDE integration as it stands now).


In production usage you want a GUI as simple as possible.  A menu to  
select your product,
which loads the correct Flash and EEPROM files, a button that says "start  
programming"
and a big Red/Green widget that says if the programming succeed or failed.

If you really want to get fancy the ability to read Pony Prog scripts via  
AVRDUDE
would be an useful addition, as Pony Prog has been abandoned by its author  
and is not
supporting new devices.  http://www.lancos.com/prog.html  I can send you a  
.ZIP file of
the script commands, off the list, if you are interested.  There are many  
people on
the Pony Prog list looking for a alternative for doing AVRs now. Hopefully  
that would
get you lots of contest points?