First tryouts

As the weekend is passed now I have a bit more experience in using the NGW board. First of all I did some testing with using the i2c driver of atmel this can be followed on the avrfreaks:

http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=58666

As expected, the usual problems that you have with everything for free and fed by a community, is also no exception here. The lack of a good API and functional documentation for instance is a real pain in the ass. You only have the stories of some good souls who wrote on several forum threads to help you out (or not). You always can write a driver yourself of course but that shouldn't be the objective as the linux framework lives long enough to provide something transparent and portable to easy adapt on new target cpu's.

So first you have the above problems in the free world and secondly you have a GCC based framework that sometimes is complex to work with. If I look at the buildroot compilation and linking of the avr32 linux and rootfs well this still has some great lack on documentation too.
As it is normal in this world to use config files it would be great to have a description available to use the several makefiles. This cannot be so hard todo. But still, I notice that people in this world think they are the gods or evangelists of computers and assume that you know all that stuff like them dominating to use linux. Maybe this is because they had to learn all by themselves so they expect that from others too. Yes I know I sound pretty negative here but if you spent almost a whole weekend in just figger out how you must make a call to a simple read/write i2c protocol. What expected to be transparent to the user is totally not case and suddenly you're lost in world full of open questions. You even start to doubt yourself and do some logic analyzer testing to finally be even more unhappy because it's not what you intend as result.

It's also true that i'm still quit a newbie in this stuff and have a long way to go. Good news is that TCP/IP sockets model work without any problem on the board. I tested it with some simple client/server echo model build as managed avr32 linux elf file in the avrstudio.

Also a pitty is that I still can't make any other SD card with linux dist. I even tried a MMC card but no luck. I only have the 512M for now. I even tried with copying the partion with gparted on a 1G SD. The copy succeeded but when u-boot starts up read error in decompressing the kernel. In my opinion the u-boot code can only handle a limited amount of cards although I'm not totally sure of the ubuntu drivers on my laptop.

I will also post a picture of the little I/O board based on PCF8574 I2C to test the NGW100.