Re: [avr-chat] UISP / AVRDude : what to choose ?

[Joerg Wunsch]

[OK, this is going to be an historical anecdote.  If you don't like
history, press the "d" key, please.]

"Daniel O'Connor" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Heh.. This is open source software.. NIH abounds ;)

As I've been around in those early days: well, it's not only been NIH,
only a little of it.

I think Brian Dean really didn't know about UISP when he started his
little "avrprog" project by that time, indeed.  But then, I've already
been trying to tweak UISP to handle the oldish AT90S1200 with its
slightly different programming algorithm.  While I eventually
succeeded in getting the job done, the resulting patch was horrible
enough so I elected to rather not contribute that back to the authors.
Also, it seemed the original author of UISP was already gone by that
time, so the software basically went into an unmaintained state
anyway.  (Later on, Ted Roth took over maintenance of it for quite a
while.)

By that time, I incidentally talked with Brian about AVRs and how to
program them (Brian used to be a long-time FreeBSD contributor already
back then), and he gave me his first version of avrprog.  It was much
easier to teach avrprog to handle the AT90S1200, and I've got a number
of other improvements to the tool as well, so eventually, this evolved
into a closer cooperation that resulted in a much more flexible
approach of programming AVRs, even though it was initially *very*
parallel bit-bang programmer minded.

Over time, Brian renamed it to AVRDUDE, moved it off his private Attic
on to savannah.nongnu.org, and made it a successful opensource
project.  Ted Roth joined the AVRDUDE team (until he had to leave off
all his opensource/free software work due to health problems), and he
once stated that he'd recognize AVRDUDE as basically turned out being
the long-standing idea of a complete UISP rewrite he'd always had in
mind.

With the recent contribution of serial bit-bang programmer code, I
think the last remaining justification for using UISP now went away.

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

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