Re: [avrdude-dev] avrdude and FT2232

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Ville Voipio wrote:

> - where should I start? I have the source of avrdude 5.5, and I have
> a general idea of what happens in it. Should I get the newest source
> from the CVS, or is it better to stick to the released one?

For real development (not just a minor bugfix or such) starting with
the CVS version is always the best idea.  At times this could turn
into a moving target shooting, but so far, the AVRDUDE CVS repository
has remained quite stable so there's little to no risk that your
checked out working copy might become so stale that you could not
merge back any possible CVS conflicts within something like 5 minutes.

> - libftdi and d2xx seem to require slightly different handling. Is
> it necessary/desirable to make both? (I am slightly inclined towards
> D2XX, but I do understand the open source point very well.)

As Wouter already mentioned, AVRDUDE considers itself to be a
multi-platform project.  So far, we can proudly state that we are at
least able to run on Win32, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, and Solaris.
(For Solaris, I'm not sure whether this OS is already supported by
libusb though.  If not, AVRDUDE cannot support USB-based programmers
there other than those that come with their own virtual serial port
driver.)

So I guess that answers your question towards libftdi then. ;-)

> - has someone done something to this direction already?

Note that the bit-banging itself is abstracted to some level inside
AVRDUDE already.  That's once been done to support bit-banging ISP
protocol on top of different hardware (printer ports, serial ports).
That way, you should hopefully be able to stuff yet another hardware
layer below the bit-bang abstraction that works on top of the FTDI
hardware.

There's a patch in the patch tracker:

https://savannah.nongnu.org/patch/?4330

with quite a bit of discussion in the audit trail.  Thomas Fischl once
intended to handle it but it seems he ran out of time.

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

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