Fred's firmware development diary

[Fred]

Day 12: I cleaned two sumps, beat the living hell out of one, cut the warped flange off the winged one, mused about cutting the flange and some side off the fwd one. The valve tool never showed up, so I couldn't do that work. Instead I cleaned up the garage and organised all the tools. The usual forum admin and irc dev discussion etc went on.

Day 13: More dev discussions, datalogging flexible design, forum admin stuff, more testing of mtx on the mac for Dave. The tools for removing the valves just arrived. I'll get out there and do that a little later. I might also do some work on the firmware, it needs my love. If SeanK's loader can now erase the entire flash, I'll maybe do a bit of hacking for him on xgate init and the Makefile etc and migrate the code to an insta boot state again. Commit comments look promising :-)

Tomorrow: Try to find some fittings for the PCV setup on the engine. Cut the flange off of the fwd sump and fit it to the winged sump ready for welding. maybe start reassembling the head. maybe bolt it back on top of the block. Start organising parts and things to bolt back on and modifying anything that requires mods. Code wise, sched, data, logging, anything general I come across. Testing and feedback on puma, loader, cst, mtx, etc.

Marcos has a Puma partly assembled and will be doing his first SM load with BDM tomorrow! If he manages that, and can load the code too, he'll be the first in South America to do so, and the first to run FreeEMS firmware on a specialised piece of hardware! Awesome and news feed worthy.

More news as it comes to hand!

Fred.

[Fred]

The loader just erased all of my flash! So I'm about to start migrating the xgate init to be proper instead of the current hack. Yippee.

People, after I get this done, you need to erase flash with SeanK's loader and load using hcs12mem, I will adjust the load script to talk about this and no longer so an erase first. A bit hacky, but only for a short time... Go Sean! :-)

Fred.

[Fred]

The migration is done, from now on, all people wishing to upload FreeEMS to their device MUST use SeanK's loader utility to erase the flash. hcs12mem and the loader script can still load the code on, but it can not erase it properly first. Yippee, it starts straight up again, excellent.

Fred.

[Fred]

Code goal for tomorrow is some sort of basic xml/json generated C integrated into the build process as a first step. Main Table can come first. Generated from XML and built into the code.

Fred.

[Fred]

I've been doing some loader testing, arguing with other devs, and trying to spec this out:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1022

Test rig modes, what do you want?

Fred.

[Fred]

Release naming time again:

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1023

Fred.

[Fred]

Marcos just ran FreeEMS on a Puma board!!!!! FCUKING AWESOME! :-)

Congratulations Marcos! :-)

Facebook updated.

IRC updated.

Wine glass topped up.

Fred.

[Fred]

http://stuff.fredcooke.com/MarcosWithPu ... reeEMS.png

The man that they couldn't root, shoot or electrocute! :-)

Fred.

[Fred]

Day 16 and 17: The last few days have been spent supporting Marcos, Dave, EssEss, and working on my truck. I've been lapping valves and panel-beating the sump, yes, you read right.

Tomorrow: Cut the flange off the fwd sump, lap cylinder 2 valves until they seal, clean lube off block deck and clean head final time, bolt head on and torque down. Along with that, work on the xml stuff, provide any fixes required, keep supporting the other guys, and maybe go shopping for some rocker cover PCV fittings as once the head is on, I'll need that in one piece ready to roll.

Tonight I'm too tired for xml or anything useful so I'm going to do something mind numbing and write a big device header file for C128.

Fred,

[Fred]

Day 18: consisted of data discussions, code discussions, hw discussions, some minor documentation fixes, and a bunch of dirty coding on my side project. I should have the side project working in a minimal way in the next day or so. I tried to lap the valves again.. but the compound was too watered down and didn't leave a nice finish. I have evaporated it today, and will retry tomorrow, in the morning. Hopefully it all goes well and I can put the head back on the block tomorrow.

It's so horribly muggy and sticky at the moment here... raining all day, and high 20's C, not pleasant really.

I'm looking forward to what tomorrow holds in store for me :-)

Fred.