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Here I will once in a while write about the stuff I am currently working on.

I have two reasons for doing this:
Just for the fun of it and to give you a chance to see what is coming up in future releases and comment on it.

And I mean it: please use the [http://avr-eclipse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Development_Blog&action=edit discussion] button above to give me your feedback! This is your chance to influence the future development of this Plugin.

==[2008-10-03] New Project Website==

The beta of version 2.3 has been out for a few days now and so far I have not heard any complains, so I guess it is running stable. I still need to update the user manual before I will release the final version. 

If you don't need TFM, then please give the beta a try and give me some feedback.


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[[Image:WikiLogo.png|frame|New project logo]]
In the meantime I have been busy on revamping the project website. The old website was hacked together in a few hours and IMHO it sucked. Handcrafting each page was a PITA and for some time I have been looking for a CMS to use for the website.

I have used the wiki provided by SourceForge for every Project, but the WikiSpace Software they use is very limited and since the SourceForge redesign the link to this wiki has been hidden so that I don't expect anyone to find it anymore.

Then SourceForge started to offer MediaWiki as a hosted application. While this initially looked good for replacing the project website with a wiki, there were some problems. The main problem is that SourceForge gives admins not enough control over the wiki. You can't even change the navigation sidebar on the left hand side. While "Random Page" might be great for Wikipedia, it has no purpose for normal project website where the information needs to be structured. Likewise "Current events" and "Community portal" are just to specialized to be really useful.

But testing the hosted app MediaWiki I decided to try installing MediaWiki myself on the webspace given to the project by SourceForge. And to my surprise it was easier than I thought. With the help of [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Sourceforge.net these instructions] I had MediaWiki running in less than an hour. And after a few more hours fiddling with the look of the wiki (including drawing a nice new logo for the project) I have now something much better than the old homepage.

The new homepage has that distinct wiki look, but I hope this will encourage you to take active part in filling this website with information.

- [[User:Innot|Innot]] 22:03, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

==[2008-07-23] Fuse Bytes Value Preview==
It has been some time since the last blog entry because after the 2.2 release I was occupied with a retraining in my job. But I now have more spare time again and have started to work on the 2.3 release.

Version 2.3 is mostly concerned with improving the fuse byte handling which will include a proper fuse byte editor.

While I already did a lot of work on the code infrastructure, the first visible thing I can show is a preview of the fuse bytes on the AVRDude Fuses property page. This started of as a debugging tool for me to test the fuse byte description handling code but I think it is a useful addition, especially once fuse byte files are supported.

[[image:avrdude_fuses_preview_1.png]]

The preview shows the fuse settings in plain text (and as bits) for the current direct hex values and (coming soon) for the selected fuses file. This is read only and not an editor.

I thought about turning the preview into an editor, but that would require quite a bit more code and some hacks because the SWT Table Control on which the preview is based is not suited for editing. So this is mostly a technical issue at the moment. The actual editor will be more Eclipse-like, similar to the editor in the Atmel AVR32 Studio.

This screenshot also shows that the plugin is ready for the ATX series of AVR processors. Unfortunately ATXmega MCUs are not yet supported by avrdude, so you can write your ATXmega programms with the plugin, but you cannot upload them yet.

Note: The missing FUSEBYTE3 is not a bug! The fuses section in the Atmel part description files for both ATXMega MCUs do not define any bits for the third fusebyte.

Next I will be coding the fuse byte editor and thereafter the support for fuse files. Stay tuned...

- [[User:Innot|Innot]] Jul 23, 2008 7:59 am


==Old entries for version 2.2==
Version 2.2 of the plugin was released on June 18th, 2008. If you are interested in the development leading up to version 2.2 you can find the relevant blog entries [[Development Blog 2.2 | here.]]