IFI Loader Reloaded

[sciguy125]

For the last couple weeks, I've been working on writing my own version of IFI Loader. The major improvements are being able to read the flash and being able to "tag" it. By tag, I mean putting some information at the end of the flash so that you know stuff about it. Normally, after it's written to the controller, all information about it is gone. You have to rely on memory and testing to find out what it is and who put it there. At the moment, the tag contains the programmer's initials and the time it was written (I'm open to suggestions about what else it could have).

This is only a preview release so that I can get some feed back about it. It has enough functionality to be used full time instead of IFI Loader, but I wouldn't do that just yet. There are many bugs and many of the widgets in the GUI don't actually do anything yet (and will probably be removed anyway). I also have to do some code clean up to get it ready for a real release.

All development of IFI Loader Reloaded has been done in Linux. It uses Qt, so you should be able to compile the GUI on Windows, Linux, and Mac with the appropriate software from Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt). The only problem with other OSes is the serial port code. Right now, it's only written for POSIX systems. I think you can use Cygwin to compile it on Windows, but I haven't tried it. Although, it'd be nice if someone would write a Windows port (information to do so is in the package).

You can temporarily get it here:
http://ratlab.dyndns.org/loader/ifi-reloaded_qt.zip

It'll only be there for this preview release. I'll find a more permanent home for it at some point. Pretty much, I'd just like to know what you think of it. Suggestions, comments, wishlist...

Notes:
-the serial port is currently hardcoded to /dev/ttyS0
-various bugs
-the menu and toolbar are pretty much decoration (little functionality)
-also see README