Fred's firmware development diary

[Fred]

Two months later...

I have fixed my SSH issues... I had a dud ssh key that was issued by a buggy package in Debian, shock horror. The event that caused it to become a dud (and my github access to cease working) happened months ago, and I did notice it break, but I never got around to figuring out why... so, I can now push and pull stuff again.

Time to tidy up my code and release 0.1.0 I guess :-) It's been a while since that happened, and this is a big one so I had better get it right!

Regards,

Fred.

[Fred]

Today I figured out how to connect my linux boxes to the world!! What this means is, as soon as I have some time (in the next 2 weeks or so) I'll be getting some major work done! :-) Thanks for your patience everyone! :-)

[Fred]

This morning I opened eclipse for the first time in a while... gasp, shock horror. Inspired by a conversation yesterday I decided it was time to get back into it! Expect progress later next week.

Fred.

[Fred]

I just loaded up several code variants onto my FRESHLY REDEPLOYED BENCH TESTING RIG and tried them out. I tried four variants and all had the same behaviour, some good, some bad. There are at least two bugs across all of those variants - one that I've known about for a while and think I know how to fix and another that I'm unsure of the cause of. They could be related. Once I get my "office" (AKA bedroom) into suitable shape for living/deving I'll get stuck into this stuff, push my changes up, and keep on developing. It'd be nice to release something stable for 0.1.0, but perhaps it's best if its just exactly what ran the car? Hard call, perhaps it's time for a poll :

http://www.diyefi.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=825

I might use git bisect to try to find the cause of the known about for a while bug. Hopefully I can track it down without too much trouble...

In other neews, we STILL need to name this sucker :

http://www.diyefi.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=782

Post, anything, really! :-)

In other news, I got a big desk into my bedroom too, so I can setup my PC and stuff permanently without fear of my bull-in-a-china-shop father using it to put a case of beer or drum of diesel on or some such thing.

I'm quite excited about the big field changes that I want to push through, and some other stuff too. Big things this year, people, big big things :-)

Fred.

[Fred]

Today I've been helping people with Git, diffing s19s playing with serial cables that don't connect properly, installing hexer, cutecom, python 2.6 on my atom330 box, and generally doing freeems stuff ALL day. Tonight I got stuck in and added packet type counting to the binary stream parser in the bin directory. Hopefully that isn't redundant work for Sean[0]'s parser utility. It's still a nice simple command line version anyway.

Code: Select all

fred@rwdlsd [00:24:10]:bin$ ./a.out /home/fred/workspaces/home/freeems-tuner/data/comms20100421201222.bin 
The length of file /home/fred/workspaces/home/freeems-tuner/data/comms20100421201222.bin is 65065

Attempting to parse file...

Data stream statistics :

Packets and checksums :
574 packets were found
574 had good checksums
0 had incorrect checksums

General issues :
534 leading characters were dropped
58 false starts occurred
58 double start bytes occurred
0 stray part packets occurred
0 chars lost from false starts 

Escaped byte profile :
48 escape bytes were found
9 escaped stop bytes were found
11 escaped start bytes were found
28 escaped escape bytes were found
0 escape pairs were mismatched

Report counts for all non-zero packet types
    Packet of type 0x0105 / 261 was found 5 times!
    Packet of type 0x0191 / 401 was found 569 times!

Which is what I wanted to know - did the log that I grabbed contain the packet dumps of the table stored in the device - yes it did.

Time for some R&R and sleep!

Fred.

[Fred]

Today I've spent cleaning out repos and files and redundant stuff that is old and out of date etc. I did a tiny bit of work on the tuner this morning and this evening and in the middle I got outside and took all the tools out of my ute and found homes for them on shelves again. I've also spent some time studying the different vanilla freeems repos that i have and the commits in them. I've done some diffing of s19 files etc too.

I also just went through the info on saimese injection and vw engine layout and found that there is no siamease issue with vw type 1 flat four engines with multi point injection due to the firing order (1432) and port cylinder ordering/arrangement (1/3 share a port and so do 2/4). Yay. I have several of these engines lying around that I could convert to EFI/Ign.

Tomorrow I've got to pick up some engine parts for an ozzy friend and continue the tool tidying and other chores. I expect that I'll probably build and diff some s19 files from various versions of the code and diff the different commits to ensure that every change makes sense. I'll then go over the code base to ensure nothing ridiculous is in there. Lastly, I want to go through the asm/code/binaries and make sure the changes make sense at that level relative to the bas s19 as pulled out of the road trip FreeEMS box. At that point it should be close for ready for a basic warts n all release.

I've got some other stuff on tomorrow too, but I forget what.

Just had a great conversation with Dave about mtx, read most of it here :

http://www.diyefi.org/forum/viewtopic.p ... 117#p10117

Fred.

[Fred]

Today I achieved nothing :-( After missing my alarm due to being up late last night discussing mtx, I had issues with my EEE resetting this morning and haven't tried to get the data out of it yet. Hopefully I don't lose anything there. I need to migrate my data onto backup disks and then rip open the eee and move the 2gig ram into my new eee and copy the os on a stick into the new eee too. In the mean time, I just need to get the data out so I can carry on working on the project. Other stuff was going on today, too. My life could be about to get insane again, but in a good way. I'll keep working on this every night though now that i have the desk setup. that is for sure. May not be progress till sunday night or monday though as have some things to do away from home including a track day... grrr. want to keep working on it... but cant!

[Fred]

I took the EEE apart to see how it was inside and found it to be very dirty and loose. Not desirable qualities in a women, let alone an EEE. So I stripped it completely, cleaned out all the dust, sand, dirt, etc and glued some broken bits back together with superglue and reassembled - seems fine so far. Might stick with it for now, copy the stuff off and keep using it, but not for dev or further photo storage etc. Just for browse/chat/music. Keep the new one looking new a bit longer.

In any case, it's 3am. I'm waiting up to take a phone call, so I'm going to do a bit of work, probably nothing serious though, can't concentrate well enough for that...

Tomorrow I'll get some serious work done :-) when i wake up....

Fred.

[Fred]

http://stuff.fredcooke.com/eee.at.beach ... orning.jpg < eee buried in sand in Barcelona :-) It spent some time under me and a girl, the poor thing.

It's now 430am, no, make that 450am had to take a phone call, I'm still up and just duplicated the tune and firmware from the volvo into my desk box. I've also confirmed that i know the code that built it is what i thought did. Next step is verifying the commits I've done and ensuring they build the same thing, and any differences are accounted for.

Bed time!

Fred @ 4:52am

[Fred]

I had literally just finished taking a dump of the last bit of internal SSD to an external usb drive and it reset itself again! Now I'm running an fsck on the 1.5TB external drive. With some luck, it comes up clean and with everything on it. Then I can duplicate it to my other old external drive, duplicate the old one into the new one, and stash the old one as a record/backup of backup.

I won't do all of that today, instead once the fsck is over, i'll mount it readonly and get on with some dev work/research and some posts on development techniques for the up and coming freeems devs out there.

lunch and overdue shower, now. More work this arvo and tonight :-)

Fred.