Re: [avrdude-dev] About avrdude-gui

[Brian Dean]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 12:03:51AM +0200, Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> I recently met J?rg Lachmann, the author of avrdude-gui who also lives
> here in Dresden.
> 
> We've been discussing the idea one of the users once had (I forgot
> whether it's been on avr-gcc-list, or maybe at avrfreaks.net) to
> integrate avrdude-gui with avrdude, rather than have it as a
> standalone utility.
> 
> We agreed that this idea has some merit.  Having to call an external
> utility to do the actual job is a nuisance anyway, let alone different
> problems between platforms.  Also, by integrating it into the same
> source tree, the GUI could immediately pick up newly added devices
> from the config file, rather than playing catch-up with the base
> avrdude.
> 
> J?rg mentioned that he'd take this occasion to rewrite the GUI using
> yet another toolkit from scratch, this times using fltk (see
> http://www.fltk.org/ ) as it appears fltk is comparably small.

I have no objection to this as long as:

     1) command line usage is not compromized, i.e., gui is not forced
        into use

     2) the gui supports all current platforms (looks like the
        proposed library does)

Nice to have would be:

     3) Makefile's and scripts operate as-is, i.e., hopefully no new
        option required to turn off the gui

     4) gui can be built/not built using a configure option or if
        autoconfigure doesn't find the required gui libraries

One of the biggest advantage I can see from use of a GUI would be
interactively setting the fuse bits.  That would be to display the
available bits for the part in question and be able to select which
ones get programmed/unprogrammed.  Of course, one doesn't need a gui
to do that, what we need for that are the fuse bit positions and
descriptions encoded in the avrdude.conf file for each part.  If we
had that, we could make fuse bit programming easier now.  But with a
gui, the fuse bit experience could be made even better.

So, still in the nice to have category, I'd also suggest:

     5) fuse bit encodings for all parts in the avrdude.conf file

     6) gui to load the fuse bit information and present a reasonable
        interface for programming/unprogramming them

Maybe what we need to support #4 is an XML parser to extract this
information from the AVR Studio supplied XML files (if that
information is there, I suspect it must be but I haven't actually
checked).  Unless Atmel has changed their position on this, we are not
permitted to include a copy of those files in AVRDUDE, but it should
be allowable to extract the content needed for programming.  Such a
tool would also allow us to easily extract and utilize fields relevent
to AVRDUDE.  If not, hand entering the information from the data
sheets shouldn't be too horrible, especially if we make the syntax /
grammar both straightforward and terse.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/