A free Gamebuino if you compile the SD card bootloader !

[Nader]

Hi guys,

i think that this bootloader is the greateast bootloader ever for the Arduino's world. would it possible the have an explained article in the wiki ( with some diagrams ) that's explain the boot cycle ?

thanks again to Myndale for his hard work on this.

Nader

[Myndale]

Thanks Nadar! Absolutely, I'll do a write-up once it's been finalized and tested thoroughly.

[rodot]

i think that this bootloader is the greateast bootloader ever for the Arduino's world.

I totally agree with you

[Nader]

Hi again Myndale & Rodot,

thinking about the way to make gamebuino more easy to be self made on breadboard, i'am thinking about the possibility to avoid using the FTDI circuit and emulate directly the usb communication in the bootloader. The best example for this is the USBaspLoader bootloader ( used in the Metaboard arduino clone ).

So the question is for Myndale ( our gamebuino bootloader Expert ) : does it's possible to combine USBaspLoader with the SD card bootloader togther (like what you hadd done for gamebuino : arduino bootloader + sd card loader)?

My request is specially relative to countries other than europe that cannot buy gamebuino either from internet :'( !! So we need the build it by our self with the minimum effort and the electronic components that are mostly available ( FTDI chip is not available ) !!

Thanks.
Nader

[Myndale]

does it's possible to combine USBaspLoader with the SD card bootloader togther

Yes, absolutely! To be honest though I don't think this the best way of going about it.

Arduino UNO replaced the FDTI chip with a ATmega8U2 (similar to the ATMega328p but not as powerful) and programmed it with firmware to emulate the FTDI chip. If you look at the UNO board you'll see there's even a separate ICSP connector for hooking a programmer directly to this chip and reprogramming it with whatever you like, it's very easy to turn a UNO into a keyboard or joystick or any other HID device by uploading new firmware.

Gamebuino, as you know, stuck with the FTDI chip. Adding that functionality to the bootloader wouldn't be too difficult, I have a few Freetronic LeoSticks at home based on the Leonardo which I believe do just that. Doing so, however, would require increasing the size of the Gamebuino bootloader to 4k, at which point you won't be able to run any games that are memory-intensive to begin with. You could of course upgrade to a more powerful ATMega chip, although that could cause other compatibility issues.

If you're having trouble sourcing FTDI's then my advice would be to simply replace it with an ATmega8U2 (or even the ATmega328p) and program it with the USB-Serial firmware which you can find in \arduino-1.0.5\hardware\arduino\firmwares\atmegaxxu2. As an absolute last resort you could also use a standard RS-232C cable and interface to it with discrete components as shown in the schematic for the single-sided Arduino board at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardS ... ngleSided3, I've used this circuit myself in the past and it works fine.

[zarathoustroy]

Hi there,

First of all congratulations Rodot for your gamebuino project. It is really amazing and very high technically level.

I was downloading the bootloader's source code (from github) in order to adapt it for my own project, but I'm having some problems to compile it. The error is on the linking step and is the following:

/Users/francoisjacob/Dropbox/maker/arduino/2boots/arduino-1.0.5-macosx/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/bin/../lib/gcc/avr/4.3.2/../../../../avr/bin/ld: section .jumps [00007ffa -> 00007ffd] overlaps section .text [00007800 -> 00008055]

I was just tooking the source code from the latest GIT and just change the ARDUINO_DIR to compile it with the 1.0.5 version of the Arduino IDE. Do you have any idea about that error?

François

[Sorunome]

Hi there,

First of all congratulations Rodot for your gamebuino project. It is really amazing and very high technically level.

I was downloading the bootloader's source code (from github) in order to adapt it for my own project, but I'm having some problems to compile it. The error is on the linking step and is the following:

/Users/francoisjacob/Dropbox/maker/arduino/2boots/arduino-1.0.5-macosx/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/bin/../lib/gcc/avr/4.3.2/../../../../avr/bin/ld: section .jumps [00007ffa -> 00007ffd] overlaps section .text [00007800 -> 00008055]

I was just tooking the source code from the latest GIT and just change the ARDUINO_DIR to compile it with the 1.0.5 version of the Arduino IDE. Do you have any idea about that error?

François

Hello there, welcome to the gamebuino forums!

That error basically means that the compiled binary is too large, that might very well be the case because of gcc version differences and thus compiler flag differences. You can read up possible fixes for this here: https://github.com/Rodot/Gamebuino/issues/18
If you have any more questions feel free to ask

[zarathoustroy]

Thank you Sorunome for the answer. I was already downgrading my avr-gcc version to use the one from Arduino ide v1.0.5 (for macosx) because the latest one was not working with the makefile. Maybe I still don't use the good one. Here is what I get with avr-gcc -v:

Using built-in specs.
Target: avr
Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr/local/AVRMacPack-20081213 --disable-dependency-tracking --disable-nls --disable-werror --target=avr --enable-languages=c,c++ --disable-nls --disable-libssp --with-dwarf2
Thread model: single
gcc version 4.3.2 (GCC)

Could you please tell me what result do you have with the avr-gcc -v command? and what Arduino's IDE version are you using?

[zarathoustroy]

I just see the information was given in the git thread and it seems I'm using the good avr-gcc version that is the same that was used to build the bootloader... so this size problem is still a mistery for me... I will double check everything again, maybe I'll find something

[Sorunome]

With which flags are you compiling?