Sean Nelson

wxWidgets: usbpicprog

Sean Nelson — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:47:05 +0000

wxWidgets has to be the worst library I’ve ever seen and used. Nothing against the Developers of usbpicprog, but I will never touch another project that uses wxWidgets. Now if they are willing, I would be willing to port all the wxWidgets code over to Qt4. Having to write wxWidgets is too much of a hassle, especially when working with internet content and a need of a proper web standards compliant browser. wxWidgets just sucks!

Sorry about ranting but I just finished writing serial support for usbpicprog. And the code is not my proudest contribution.

Early Design: Flashrom GUI

Sean Nelson — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:04:45 +0000

Here is an early GUI design for a Flashrom frontend.

In other news: Flashrom now has support for the Bus Pirate. Thanks goes out to Carl-Daniel Hailfinger!

BusPirateGUI: I2C

Sean Nelson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:59:33 +0000

Tonight, I worked on implementing I2C EEPROM in the GUI and had to change the interface.

I2C Interface

Hopefully this is the best, in that I wouldn’t have to create a database of the supported EEPROM Chips the interface supports. This will require the user to know the size and address of the chip, but the address can be found from the Search Device function. Note, this hasn’t been tested, At All.

CV/Resume Done (for now)

Sean Nelson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:38:49 +0000

I just finished the layout and organization of my CV using wordpress. Each Employment and Education Institution has its own Page, which allows for a quick synopsis for the whole CV and a detail page for a particular employment/education period.

CV/Resume

Sean Nelson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:53:06 +0000

Today, I’ve started work on a Curriculum vitae. Hopefully in a few days, I’ll have a comprehensive CV/Resume that I can refer employers to. Hopefully I can also provide a downloadable version in PDF and/or MSOffice formats.

Somewhat more personal: My Website.

Sean Nelson — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:53:39 +0000

Today, I decided to work a bit on my website to make it more personalized. While link-jumping I stumbled upon Andreas Viklund’s website with some beautiful Themes for WordPress, one of which is what you see. But I didn’t like a few little details, so I modified the widths, font size, line-height, etc. Hopefully the changes will be a bit more pleasant to visitors. Thanks goes out to my friend Ben, who’s actually a real graphic designer, for giving me some pointers this morning.

BPGUI: Windows and Deployment

Sean Nelson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:07:42 +0000

Today, I worked on getting the Bus Pirate GUI to build on windows using Visual C++ 2008. There were some problems with how my Message Event Handling/Filtering was written and I had to go back and rewrite major parts of it to get it to compile under Windows. Mac OS X builds require Qt4.5, ZLib, and LibPNG to be bundled with the Executable, which means copying and setting the app to look within itself for Qt4 and other libraries. It’s pretty difficult to get it done, but luckily there’s a handy command that does everything, it even creates a package image. The only downside is it can’t add dynamic libraries that are part of the project tree. Since getting things working in Windows and Mac, I decided to release preview packages for Windows and Mac OS X. They’ve been uploaded to the Bus Pirate’s Google Code Site. If you run into any problems, I’m sorry and would love the feedback.

Port Settings Saved on Exit, Apply chosen Settings on Port Connect.

Sean Nelson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:46:26 +0000

Today I decided to implement and test proper setting of the Baud Rate, Parity, etc. I wanted to ensure that everytime the Bus Pirate is opened that the settings chosen on the Settings Tab would be used. Everything was working out fine until I was testing the changes and found out, after hours of scratching my head, that the way I wrote the autoconnection code didn’t allow enough time to create all the Widgets and Information visible in the GUI when I needed to access the information from the GUI to initially connect to the Bus Pirate on first startup. Also, everything is created in one to many hierarchy. The MainWindow now holds/creates everything from the Binary Mode code (which includes Serial Connections) and Settings management code to each GUI Tab. The Binary Mode code creates a new Serial Connection, but doesn’t open/start it. The Settings Management code only handles reading settings at startup and writes the settings to the configuration file before completely exiting the Application. Now you have to manually Open the connection and initialize the Bus Pirate. I don’t know of any way of the application to check and automatically open the Bus Pirate. The GUI as it is, is pretty much finalized on layout and such. The work still to be done is the SPI, I2C, 1Wire implementation; also RawWire needs to be added soon and GUI tabs designed.

If you have any Ideas or would like to help, please visit the project page and download the source code and help out.

Google Code Project Page

Another Update: Bus Pirate GUI

Sean Nelson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:11:03 +0000

I’ve refined the GUI so that messages use Event Filtering/Handling for posting messages to any Log Screen. This way allows messages to be posted to any screen from anywhere as long as there’s a way to get to the intended recipient of the message. Also there is a placeholder for the status of the Bus Pirate, on the right-side of the Status Bar. The left side holds messages related to GUI’s functionality and status. I’m still having communication problems, the only way everything works is when the Bus Pirate is plugged in, GUI App is started, and either SPI Chip ID (which still doesn’t work just right) or ASCII Script Execution (which is just the ASCII equivalent of SPI Chip ID Function. Otherwise, things don’t work as expected (from my point of view/thinking).

I’ve also decided to post the source code to the Bus Pirate’s SVN repository. I would greatly appreciate if others could step up and help me, either through developing patches or ideas.

The Bus Pirate Google Code Project Site

GUI Tab Sensitive Window Logging

Sean Nelson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:20:06 +0000

As a minor change to the Bus Pirate Gui is the ability to log important messages to a particular tab, for example, SPI commands are logged to the log view on the SPI Tab. See Shots:

SPI logged to window.

ASCII Text Programmer Logging to window.

If you don’t know this wasn’t easy to do, I had to figure out how to redirect all debug, warning, and critical error messages to the windows. Currently the warning is still piped to ; warning and critical messages are printed to the window. Warning messages are used as regular status messages; while critical messages are used for error messages like when interface configuration fails. The Main problem was to define a message Handler in Qt4.5 you need to use a static, main()-level function; but since the message windows are buried 2-3 levels deep within the GUI its not easy to access them from main().

As it is now, the SPI window has a child called msgLog where we send the messages. The SPI window is child of QTabbedWidget which is a child of MainWidgetFrame which is child to MainWindow. So to send messages we need to register a message Handler in main() with qInstallMsgHandler(). To get to SPI_log we have to go from main() thru MainWindow –> MainWidgetFrame –> QTabbedWidget –> SPIGui —> msglog. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, it’s how everything is related in pseudo-ObjectOriented Languages. I had to define when ever the focus changes from one tab to another to define a holder msgLog for sending messages.

Off-topic: By the way, there’s only one or two languages that are considered “true” OO Languages, one of which is Smalltalk. And no, Java can’t be considered a Real OO Language. Also, if you don’t know yet: I Hate Java! Why? Because most Computer Science Students only know and use it, they don’t know how to properly use a Pointer (which is how, at the basic level, all hardware works), and has way too much inconsistency with it’s Language Syntax and how everything interacts with everything else as defined by Sun.