Re: [avr-chat] RFC: Unified Microcontroller Programming File

[Richard Urwin]

On Monday 18 Apr 2005 10:43 pm, E. Weddington wrote:
> Colin O'Flynn wrote:
> >Hey,
> >
> >This is from a thread on AVRFreaks, and previous ideas bounced
> > around. My idea is to create a unified AVR programming file format,
> > possibly extensionable to work with any platform (ie: not only
> > AVR).
> >
> >My basic idea was as follows:
> >
> >Have one .tar (possibly .tar.gz or .zip) format file, which a
> > different extension. This would be done to ensure we know what it
> > is really supposed to be, perhaps .ump (Unified Microcontroller
> > Programming file) - this .ump extension doesn't seem to be too
> > heavily used unlike most other extensions
> > (http://www.rmspl.com.au/umatrix.htm is the only thing I could find
> > that uses it)
> >
> >This file would have in it several separate files:
> >
> >--*.hex file <-- The AVR image file
> >--*.fuse file <-- new text file with AVR fuse settings in it
> >--*.txt file <-- text file with version information on the rest of
> > the files, other notes
> >--*.md5 file <-- md5sum of everything, save for the .md5 file of
> > course
> >
> >You will see that everything could be done with normal utilities
> > available on Linux - md5sum, tar, etc. This way the file format is
> > as easy to work with as possible and you aren't locked into
> > specific tools.
> >
> >As well to make "programs" that do stuff like verify the file's
> > md5sum and generate a proper md5sum after you have modified the
> > file would be simple shell scripts (on Linux/Unix anyway) which
> > makes it easy to work with. In fact a wrapper for avrdude could
> > probably be made which would extract the files, check them, then
> > call avrdude as needed.
> >
> >What do you think?
>
> I think that this is very doable.
>
> For reference, IIRC Java .jar files are nothing more than a .zip file
> that contains other files and has been renamed. This is what you are
> proposing too. The zip format and libraries are available on both
> *nix and Windows (as well as Cygwin). However, the Uniz zip *utility*
> does not come with WinAVR, but, strangely enough, it does have bzip2.
>
> The program md5sum is available on WinAVR, so that covers the .md5
> file. The .txt file is written by the user. The .hex file is, of
> course, generated by AVR GCC. The only thing really new would be the
> .fuse file. In the -U swtich, we need to have something like
> Immediate Mode (m) but the contents in a file. Implementing that
> would probably not be hard.

I'm an AVR newbie here, so I might be talking out of my hat, (or 
somewhere else.)

Is there not the possibility of multiple .hex files? I know that's how I 
program Flash and eeprom from gas-generated objects.

Might it be a good idea to put a list of hex files and their targets 
into the .txt, or their own file. The fashionable way to do that would 
be XML; the parser is a large overhead when a simple text format would 
surfice, but it would make room for expansion.

Something like (in XML for self-documentation):
<file name="flash.hex" address="0x8000" label="flash">
textual description
</file>
You could encode other information in there for the microcontroller part 
number, the release number, the author and the copyright details.

-- 
Richard Urwin