Gamebuino uploader tool

[inversesandwich]

If you've ever used a Teensy, you'll know that it uses a nifty loader program.




You can run it standalone, and it also automatically pops up when uploading with Arduino.

We could have a similar thing for Gamebuino for a number of reasons;

• Some people just want to upload their game straight to the board
• Others would like to put the hex file on their SD card
• and some may want to use the emulator

A loader could be a great way to do it.

Here's a mockup (albeit crappy one):


The browse box would be pre-filled in if you launched from the Arduino environment, and the bar above the go button is a progress bar. The circles on the side are radio boxes to select an option.

What do you think?

[dotdan]

Sounds great to me.

smart tools are very important in my Point of view


Cheers
Daniel

[Myndale]

I'm a fair way along in developing a tool that does all this but in practice it's not working out so well. When you upload a game via the Arduino IDE it uploads a byte at a time. HEX files, on the other hand, store bytes as hex strings i.e. 2 characters per byte. Add the overhead of the per-line header and checksum and they wind up being 3 times larger than the program they represent.

Or to put it another way, raw HEX files take about 3 times longer to upload to the Gamebuino for storage on the SD card than uploading the program directly via the IDE. And that's just how long it takes to send it across the serial link, you then have to save it to SD with the notoriously slow tinyFAT library, which was a pain in the rear end because it doesn't actually support binary writes so I had to add that feature myself. Take saving into account and you wind up looking at roughly 10 times slower....now multiply that by however many files you're trying to upload to the SD card at once.

I guess I could still keep plugging away at it if people really wanted it, but from what I've seen so far it doesn't seem worth it.

[ripper121]

Pleas add a option to upload or run it with emu.

[Myndale]

Pleas add a option to upload or run it with emu.

You mean if there's a HEX file already loaded in the emulator then add a menu option to upload it to a connected Gamebuino? Actually that's not a bad idea...

[Myndale]

Done! Latest version available from the usual place.

Wow, that was fast! I wonder if we'll end up having a full featured Gamebuino IDE

[ripper121]

Pleas add a option to upload or run it with emu.

You mean if there's a HEX file already loaded in the emulator then add a menu option to upload it to a connected Gamebuino? Actually that's not a bad idea...

No i mean that you can chouse in the IDE between Upload to Gamebuino or Start it with the Emulator

[Myndale]

Wow, that was fast! I wonder if we'll end up having a full featured Gamebuino IDE

I didn't actually type that sentence into my post. Did someone with admin privileges accidentally hit "Edit" instead of "Quote"?

[Myndale]

No i mean that you can chouse in the IDE between Upload to Gamebuino or Start it with the Emulator

Tricky. Unlike my emulator, the IDE doesn't talk directly to the Arduino using the bootloader's native protocol, it instead calls avrdude to do the upload for it. I looked into the avdude source code and it doesn't seem to support any kind of plugin architecture, which means I'd have to either provide a new version of avrdude for people to install over the existing one or write a driver to emulate a serial or asp device, which is a nightmare in win8. Alternatively, I could make people install one of the freeware utilities that bridge serial port connections, but again this is getting really messy and unreliable. It should be easy, but itwon't be until the Arduino team provide support for customization devices.

Great suggestion, but at this stage I'm concentrating on Lunar Lander and emulator bug fixes.