Re: [avr-gcc-list] freeice project

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Armand ten Doesschate <address@hidden> wrote:

>Joerg,
>(if I may call you),

(of course!)

>The chip I use for usb is the all famous FT245BM. It is supported under M$
>(free drivers available) and - surprise - also for FreeBSD (I am not that
>familiar with it but version 4.7 should have support).

Hmm, but how's your GDB serializer going to sit on top of these drivers?

Anyway, nice to know that the basic driver framework for them is
already available.  Since FreeBSD and NetBSD basically share the same
USB framework (probably OpenBSD, too), this together with Linux
probably covers 95 % of the opensource OSes.

>However you must apply a vendor and product id (I obtained them by courtesy
>of FTDI). The vendor id is FTDIs and the product id is different from the
>standard product id of the original device. This means it will live happily
>next to the existing standard device.

Should be easy enough with a loadable kernel module.

>The freeice project (i.e. gdb_serialzer) can be extended with other
>communication interfaces (ethernet, rs232) and / or other
>functionalities (programmer, support more targets, etc) - the sky is
>the limit - so I believe it will make itself definitely valuable.

Fine.  Despite of being slow, i still think that RS232 has some value
because of it being universally available.  So the remainder of our
toolchain has at least once been tested under Solaris as well, and is
expected to work there, except of the parallel mode of avrdude.  (Most
likely, avrdude will require patching, but that should be easy.)
Also, the first MacOS X users who want to use the AVR toolchain are
appearing...

The most interesting thing about freeice is that it aims to be
cross-MCU itself though.
-- 
J"org Wunsch                                           Unix support engineer
address@hidden        http://www.interface-systems.de/~j/