Wednesday, March 30, 2011

New bootloader, Win32 support

Although there was a preliminary programmer for win32, I only recently realised that win32 does not actually support natively serial speeds above 256Kbaud. This stroke me as very odd, we're on the 21th century now, with advent of serial links not rs232-based (like USB serial controllers) having speeds of 1Mbaud, 3Mbaud or even higher is very common, it's weird why Microsoft did not expand its baudrate selection to higher speeds.

Anyway.

So to support win32, we've to get that speed down, so I decided on a two-steps approach. We can initially talk to ZPUino at a reasonably lower speed (115200), and then depending on OS and eventually board features rise this speed to something more acceptable (which would be 1/3Mbaud on Unices, 256Kbaud on Windows). This requires changes to bootloader and to programmer which I am ultimating as I write.

Also for win32 support we need the compilers. Those are building now, if everything goes well I hope full win32 support will be on next Alpha version (which, by the way, will be due this weekend). The programmer already has a fix for the insane command line processing in mingw32 (or is it msvc?), so everything seems to be on rails.

Alvie

Wednesday, March 2, 2011