Re: [avr-chat] GUI wrapper for avrdude

[Joerg Wunsch]

Juergen Harms <address@hidden> wrote:

> I am passing some quiet vacation afternoons, dreaming. Has a GUI
> wrapper for avrdude already been considered? - i.e. replacing
> painful command line input for some frequently made avrdude calls by
> a frontend that allows selecting what you want to do in a nice
> graphical user interface?  Am I the only one who would like to have
> such a tool?

Well, whether a GUI is less painful than a command-line is another
matter ;-), but here's my EUR 0.02:

.. There's one GUI wrapper written in Java, I eventually forgot its
  name though.  It has at least been announced on avrfreaks.net, so if
  you limit google's search to that site, you should be able to find
  it.  My major gripe with it is that it has been developed completely
  independently, out of touch with the avrdude developers, and
  duplicates quite a bit of avrdude itself, like parsing the config
  file.  (The avrdude-gui Eric mentioned suffers from the same issue,
  IIRC.)  So if avrdude changes something, updates, whatever -- that
  GUI will lag behind by design.

.. I recently rewrote avrdude itself, so it now internally consists of
  a backend library containing all the low-level stuff, with the
  traditional main() just being one frontend to it.  So it should now
  be moderately easy to create different frontends as well.  I once
  made an attempt to setup some kind of wxglade-based wxWidget GUI for
  it, but it never really evolved beyond its infant stage.  I have to
  admit that I personally don't really have much motivation for that
  (which explains why I eventually forgot about continuing that
  effort) because for me, the command-line isn't painful at all.  I'm
  used to it, I do know the hex values of the fuses for those AVRs I'm
  working daily with anyway (and always have a hard time in the rare
  situations when sitting in front of AVR Studio, to find the verbose
  textual representations for the hex values I already know ;), so it
  seems I'm not really the person who would push that into any kind of
  usable shape.  But I'd like to invite anyone who's got a better
  motivation than me.  My only personal acceptance criterium for
  integrating it into the avrdude tree would be that it ought to
  support the same number of platforms that avrdude already supports
  right now, namely Win32 (preferrably through MinGW), Linux, MacOS X,
  FreeBSD, and Solaris.

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

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