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New app - avrdude

A project log for ZeroPhone - a Raspberry Pi smartphone

Pi Zero-based open-source mobile phone (that you can assemble for 50$ in parts)

aryaArya 07/01/2018 at 22:200 Comments

This month, I've been working on an avrdude app - an app that uses avrdude to program AVR microcontrollers. It's now finished, with 500 LOC in the app itself and 800 more in the associated libraries. You might be surprised - why this and not something else, like a messenger app? Here are the reasons:

The end result is an Atmel MCU programming app that can backup and restore firmware from/to the MCU, flash arbitrary .hex files and bootloaders. For now, I've only tested it with usbasp programmers, but linux SPI device and other programmer support will be coming soon. I've used it a lot already, and it's even more useful given that I'm now working on several AVR-powered ZeroPhone mod boards (so, a simple way for users to update the mod board firmware is needed). It also has pinout information and the most crucial settings available, as well as some user-friendliness related features. In addition to that, there's a lot of bugfixes, improvements, new ideas for improving ZPUI and insights into problems that ZPUI has.

One large problem that I now understand ZPUI has - lack of some kind of markup system for UI design. Essentially, when you're trying to draw your own UI, you need to calculate position of each element on the screen, requiring plenty of math (and extra variables) if you don't want parts of your UI to overlap/disappear. When it comes to text, the situation is even worse - as of now, it's pretty much impossible to properly word-wrap arbitrary text on a screen, for example. What do we do about it? I have no idea yet, and that's something I'll need to address sooner or later, unless I want ZeroPhone to be infamous for ugly apps... or not scaling further than the small display we're currently confined to.

There are also some problems regarding UI elements not being universal enough - for example, there's no way to have a Nokia-style settings menu (a menu with combined checkboxes, listboxes and sliders), combining lots of different settings in an easy-to-use view. Input UI elements still aren't any good, either, I expect to work on them once I get to the SMS-related apps, which will happen soon - I'm working on the modem integration with ofono now, continuing work that monsieur_h started. In general, I'm thinking about the UI a lot now - can't wait to make a proper main menu, with icons in a grid and everything!

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