,Topics of discussion: AVR, NLP, and MLB.

Brandon finally received all the parts for his electric piano conversion, so we set about getting his AVR toolchain and JTAG programmer working. We had a discussion of how messy the current binutils/avr-gcc/avr-libc combination is --- it was one of the worst source builds I have have ever had to perform. It took me more than a day on my machine --- and Brandon sped through the process in just 6 hours on his.

For those of you out there that are receiving that relished error "illegal opcode movw for mcu avr3", there is hope! My recommendations are:

• Remove all traces of avr-binutils. Kill them dead. Remnants of the latest release of binutils will wreak havoc when you try to work either with bleeding edge snapshots or older versions.
  
• Forget the latest releases --- go back several stable versions of both gcc and binutils, to at least January 2008, or even back into 2007. (Your other option is to get bleeding edge snapshots, but I did not have any more success with these than with the latest releases.)
  
• Download all the avr-gcc and binutils patches you can find from the date of release of binutils and gcc that you downloaded to the date of the next stable version; attempt to apply all of them. Don't worry if some fail --- just push ahead.
• For the actual configuring, I recommend reading this page.
• Make and install binutils.
  
• Make and install gcc (fingers crossed!)
• Only upon the successful completion of avr-gcc's install should you even worry about avr-libc.

Note that these are only hints. I am not attempting to give a full overview of what works --- but you'll save many headaches if you start with these steps.

On calling my shots:

• You may have noticed the lack of posts. Surprise! I failed to meet both drawing post calls
  
• I did program my livescribe. penlets.com was a major help
• I did get a relatively detailed outline ready for nanowrimo

Score: 2/4.

For next week:

• A post on my evil plans for communicating with linux from my livescribe pulse.
• The beginning of a nano novel. Huzzah!
  

Labels: hackjam, minutes