Re: [avrdude-dev] Avrdude Gui problem

[Ville Voipio]

> Factory floor is something I hadn't been thinking about.  That puts an 
> entirely different twist on it in my mind.  For that environment I would 
> argue that you would want to be able to customize the gui at least to 
> the extent of turning off stuff that isn't needed.

Factory floor, hmmm... Interesting... Verrrry interrresting...

We are using avrdude at the factory floor, but it is an ancient (and 
custom patched) version with a bug-ugly custom GUI written on top of the 
CLI and a bunch of shell scripts to make serial numbers, etc.

What I'd love to have there is a simple GUI tool with these things:

- place for instructions (photographs of the position of the programming 
connector, etc.) HTML or PDF would be just fine.
- a big "PROGRAM" button
- possibility to tweak the serial number into a given EEPROM/FLASH 
location (either as an ASCII string or in binary form)
- green light when done, red light when not ok
- progress indicator (a simple bar with texts "erasing, programming, 
verifying")

It doesn't matter if preparing a project takes a bit of work (requires 
XML configuration files, etc.) as that needs to be done only once per 
product. It is usually done by the coder, so Makefile is your friend.

What we have right now is three files xxx.rom, xxx.eep and xxx.fuses, 
where the last one is a script to be executed in batch mode. Then we 
also have a shell script to patch the serial number into the .eep file.

It would be nice, if the factory-floor program could use a .zip with all 
the files (binaries, fuse settings, instruction files) so that sending a 
single file to the subcontractor would suffice.

---

XML is nice, but it might be that a script-like file could be better at 
this point. avrdude has already defined many of the required 
instructions, it only needs a few extensions: serial number handling and 
probably some GUI error messages (i.e. error handling).

---

Oh, and if someone is really going to make such a tool, please try to 
keep it open for extensions (not toot tightly bound to avrdude API). I'd 
love the AVR programming tool but kill for such a tool if it could also 
program ARMs and CPLDs through the JTAG connection. I may not be the 
only one...

As an inherently lazy person, I'd use wxPython to write the tool. It 
works pretty well in multi-platform environment. OTOH, wxWhatever should 
work well, this is just a matter of personal preference.

- Ville