I've been doing mostly sensor-based systems and I think these microcontrollers are the perfect fit. ARM Cortex (they go from M0 to M4, and their series seem to keep growing), an architecture that was specially designed for low-power sensor-based embedded systems, allowing to measure "stuff" while the CPU is stopped, a nice set of peripherals (OPAMP, 12bit DAC and ADC), great support for GCC ARM Embedded (which makes them really ease to use or getting started to) and a factory-programmed UART bootloader.
The bootloader uses XMODEM-CRC protocol and TeraTerm may be used for uploading. However if you want a command-line tool (like "avrdude" for AVR microcontrollers), there's anything you can use. So, I built one.
Some time ago DP kindly published a blog post about Component Organizer. (CO's current website: http://3xdigital.com/comporg) Some complained about not being open source. The reason I didn't share the code was because it was my very first adventure with C# and OOP and thus the code and the "logic" (what logic? :P) behind it turned a completely mess. Adding new features to it was increasingly harder even for me that I'm pretty sure no one will be interested in trying to comprehend what I did.
Meanwhile I have been receiving some feature requests by mail but now I don't have time to keep it's development (I'm an EE student just starting my MSc thesis which has nothing to do with CO nor software development).
So, some time/days ago I decided to re-write CO, now with C++/Qt to make it cross-platform and also open source. Not easy task given the free time I (will) have to do it, but "it's for the sake of a better open source society" :D Also, with the experience I gained meanwhile, I believe the code will look and works much better.
I'm planning to release the code and executables by the end of this month and I'll use GitHub to make forks and contributions easy.
For now I give you with some GUI screenshots (with dummy data) of what I have accomplished so far. Feedback is very welcomed!
(click to see in original size)
Edit: Why CO? One of the reasons I decided to rewrite it was the fact of noticing that there are some cloud-based alternatives (partkeepr, arena partslist - not free nor os) but few/none to run from you computer/pen drive/wtv disk you may use offline. Also, with CO you can also neatly organize your favourite application notes.
Im wondering if it's possible to use pirate-loader to upload .hex files to other PICs that have already the ds30 bootloader programmed. I tried to run pirate-loader.exe to import a .hex file from one of my MPLAB projects but I get the following error:
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Checksum does not match, line 4
Then I realise that BPv3-Firmware.hex has all characters with uppercase format. So I edited my "test.hex" to be also with uppercase characters. Now the error is:
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Current record address is higher than maximum allowed, line 32
First of all, sorry for this lazy question, but I can't easily understand licenses with all those fancy words. It's not directly related to DP but once DP uses PIC micros to develop open source hardware I hope you can help me. Suppose I develop a board like Arduino with a PIC, so I need to compile the code everytime I want to upload it. Can I distribute the pic30-gcc.exe file along with all other files of the project?
Thanks!
(edit: just changed "publishing" to "distributing" in the topic's title)
