Update...

Have ignored this blog for a while, sorry folks.

The board went together without any disasters, My first designed and soldered board with a qfp144 cpu and I nailed it :) - a couple issues, but hey its beta-ish .

Wrote a bunch of new code, most of which is to conform to the different hardware.
screen:   was vga(320x240) now 4x20 lcd
buttons: was qtouch controlled now 4 tactile switches
Still need to work more with the finer points of the iso to cd emulation. It works but theres allot of room for  growth to fine tune the code and include some of the ignored routines.

Change the way I handle iso files. Before I couldn't support fragmented files, Now can handle fragmented files with only about a 8% loss in speed. Plus with the new setup will easily be able to handle split iso's that are over 4gig's in size( get around the fat32 size limitation).

Looking into svn hosting with sourceforge.com, have started the setup process.
in the mean time check out the forum

Tracking waisted time on cd's

Over at the official site http://renosite.com the next 60 days of wasted time playing with cd's will be recored. Every time a cd is looked for plus the load time for each cd's.

This way once the production unit is up and running then will start to compare times - I bet I'll even be surprised at the saved time.

line to page: Tracking info here

Well I have time on my hands...

Nothing to do but wait for the board..... Started a full revamp of renosite.com. Hope to have alot more info hosted there as this project continues.

ordering board this weekend

The layout looks good will be ordering my first prototype board this weekend. If everything goes as planned will be assembling the fist avr32 high speed cd emulator within a few weeks. The boards from batchpcb.com takes a few weeks to process. Then some firmware tweak and ill be up and running!

Current progress

Ordering the parts for my first fully assembled prototype. Ended up deciding on a 4x20 lcd screen, sd card (iso storage) interface, 4 pushbutton interface input, AVR32 cpu (for the high speed interface), including a misc assortment of pcb parts. As soon as the parts come in i'm going to compare placement with the eagle pcb printout. If everything lays out correctly then I'll get the board printed through BatchPCB.com

Ordered a decent soldering station and all the misc items - good magnifying desk lamp, solder wick, solder paste, couple kinds of fluxes, etc... Been practicing soldering qfp packages. Its easer than I thought. The qfp144 pin package of the AVR32 scared me at first. Been mostly working with through hole. But hey now I know I can assemble the boards.

Currently parts and pcb cost for 1 off runs are about $120, but once It's all working I'll start making them in bigger batches to bring cost down.

Also tossing around the idea of bringing out the unused io pins for a cheap devel kit working with Atmels AVR32 framework - just modified to work with the lcd and switches the rest of the layout is based off of the EVK1104 (avr32, sd interface, usb hs, jtag, reset / gp - DFU Bootloader). Once the project is done, ill be deciding how far I want to explorer this route. If interested drop me an email: creno@csuoberlin.com

Till next time, thanks for your interest...

To open source - or - To Not open source

I don't know, would like some input. I really think this needs to be developed - and open to everyone.
There has already been a device realeased to the public for purchase( search iodd ). I'm thinking that selling something new like that would just slow the spread of knowledge - give it away.

New devices or new thoughts patterns should be shared. And being that all of the code used in this project is either created by me or code borrowed from public domain....... Why not share this?

I'm not 100% there yet - it's kinda my baby... I would like some input - Please share your thoughts.

Peace,
CReno

I'm still here.

Have not worked on the project for about a month now. Got a little burned out! But in the next couple of days I will start again. I got to the point where there where only a couple of bugs left to figure out. One big bug is within atmels MassStorage framework code. On certain op codes combinations it would cause an infinite loop within the usb out stall routine, unfortunately I don't have a 100% knowledge of the inner workings of the usb  protocol and just putting some sort of counter within the loop to drop out fixed it - or I should say patched it. Being a patch I have noticed a couple of glitched where the scsi op codes that should have processed correctly doesn't here and there. unfortunately being who I am - I cannot live with "mostly" working code.... I need to dive deeper into this bug. The other minor bugs are just cleanup from within my code no biggie. It sure would be nice to have a couple people working on this project with me, but for the time being I would like to keep this closed source.