I2C, SPI, JTAG, USI debugging board/software combo

[biot]

Kudos to you.
I have a Windows laptop that I can perhaps leave running for 24h for doing the builds. If 24/7 is not required I can set up one of my Windows VMs to do that whenever it's needed, perhaps once a week?

That sounds great, thanks! It would be very helpful if you could take a look at libsigrok 0.2.1, which we released this week. More is needed than just a compile run of course -- testing stuff out and creating bug reports for features, drivers etc that don't work on windows would advance things even more. As would fixing those things, but hey :-)

I have a few tools that can be interfaced with sigrok and willing to also help on those.

That's even more interesting. Drop by the IRC channel or mailing list (contact details on sigrok.org) and tell us about it -- we like to make sure nobody's doing duplicate work on devices, and in any case we can help you get started. There is a lot you can do even without programming C: we do a lot of documenting on the wiki before we even start on a driver.

It's not a rant at sigrok or its developers, it's at the fact that without a little bit of the extra mile all these efforts fail to reach 90% of the audience.

And we are utterly, absolutely aware of this.

[marshallh]

Hard drive pics  (new 1tb WD Blue)

I see they're finally using bga ddr2 now.

WDHC8TD

http://imageshack.us/a/img541/8884/vanb.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img823/936/hqnk.jpg


They even left off the 100ohm diff clock termination on the ram. Really scrimping pennies (or its a nonstandard ram with builtin termination)

[simonvav]

PIC32MX250F128B microcontroller is perfect, if you need I2C bus suppoort. You can also program the microcontroller from VB.NET and there are plenty of samples. You just need to search for "PIC32MX250F128b vb.net example"... There is also a very nice VB.NET example with source code that gives you I2C buss access to 16-bit ADC7414 temperature sensor via USB.

[Electro Fan]

It's like being nibbled to death by a single duck that puts in a half assed effort.

That's a good one

[andyturk]

Yeah, that 'smooth' chip is one i worked on.

Holy shit! You mean there's BASIC running inside my hard drive?

 

[free_electron]

Yeah, that 'smooth' chip is one i worked on.

Holy shit! You mean there's BASIC running inside my hard drive?

 

Well it was the only way to make sure we didn't have problems with pointers , made by confused programmers using a language that got only a 'c' score...

Driveware is written in either assembly or a specific subset of c. ( ansi c with strict limitations on what can and cannot be done. The real low level code needs to be compiled as-is. No optimization allowed by the compiler. Code is compiled using RVDS and ARMCC.

Functions and procedures are running in lock-step with the mechanics.