Softants Blog - February 2009

20th February 2009 - Latest Software

We are still halfway between v0.2 and v0.3 - we have been busy making circuits that will attach to the helicopter using version 0.2 of the software but to the version 0.3 schematic of hardware layout.

It's one of those good days, we have a breadboard on the heli and we can fly it manually as if the the breadboard isn't there!

Hopefully, weather permitting, we can take our heli into the big wide world and fly it. What we are hoping to see is a manually controllable helicopter with the ability to switch to automonous conrtrol - even if the automonous control yealds nothing.

10th February 2009 - USB Bootloader

As a side note to the project, we have been playing with the ability of the AVR chips to contain a bootloader. What is a bootloader I hear you cry?

A bootloader on an AVR chip allows you to have two different programs on an AVR chip at the same time. This facility is normally used to have one of the programs (the bootloader) run which will in turn allow that program to load and burn the second program (the main code). This is very useful if you need to have an AVR that a user can reflash using nothing other than a USB interface instead of a proper AVR programmer.

In our case, we gave the chip away (togeather with a small circuit it was on) so that person could then play around and learn all about AVR's without having to purchase or build their own programmer.

To find out more about building your own self programming circuit and everything involved with bootloading, we found the links available on the BootloadHID site very useful. The page is part of a wider project that is based around a USB Library for AVR chips.

We only found the above references after a bit of searching; the first site we found was the AVR USB Bootloader project which is how our first circuit was designed to.

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