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A week is a long time in politics
Posted by Chris
on
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
...but a mere microsecond when you're working on a technology project with a looming deadline. We've not had much time to update the blog lately, but that's because things have been happening (and changing) at quite a pace over in Nerd Towers.
We're on a mission to get the first ScoreSure Golf Pro prototype developed and working, which has meant lots of late nights and early mornings, and hundreds, nay thousands of lines of code being written and re-written.
The big panic is because our mate Xing from NuElectronics is over in China for Xmas, and we've a fantastic opportunity to actually get some real, working prototypes made up.
Not a bread-board prototype (which is what we use for development) but an actual, final product, in a professionally finished enclosure and a fancy little wallet!
All this, of course, means that we actually have to settle on a final design for the schematics and that in turn has meant ironing out lots of little bugs and issues. For example, making sure that the Flash memory is connected to a consistent port and whether lines we've tied to power/ground may need to be controlled in future developments. It's a balancing act - getting enough done to meet today's demands, but trying to think about what might be needed in future versions of the product so we can re-use the same products and not have to re-develop the entire thing for a minor change.
The biggest obstacle we've had is stream-writing data to the Flash eeprom chip.
We thought we had this nailed, but when drawing bitmaps back to the screen there were missing pixels in the image. We put this down to a dodgy bitmap drawing routine and decided it would be easily fixed. It turns out, that the problem was actually with the Flash/memory writing routines and we had big gaps in our bitmap data!
That in turn has meant rebuilding the device pretty much from the ground up to try to isolate where the problem stemmed from (after all this, there was a bug in the VB app we used to send data to the ScoreSure device, not the actual device itself!). It was a worthwhile exercise, however, because our written design - the electrical schematic we sent for production - has changed quite a bit since we've gone back and had to re-think everything.
But - finally - we have a working ScoreSure device. One that can display menus as well as bitmaps. You can even edit menu entries so we have a mechanism for editing player details.
We're off to fill up on coffee and get back to the grindstone.
In the meantime, here's a screenie showing working bitmaps on the QVGA LCD screen.
And for regular readers of the blog, who may be asking "what about the online Google-maps-based golf course editor"? (all two of you) here's a link to try out latest development: http://www.scoresure.co.uk/googlemaps.htm
We're on a mission to get the first ScoreSure Golf Pro prototype developed and working, which has meant lots of late nights and early mornings, and hundreds, nay thousands of lines of code being written and re-written.
The big panic is because our mate Xing from NuElectronics is over in China for Xmas, and we've a fantastic opportunity to actually get some real, working prototypes made up.
Not a bread-board prototype (which is what we use for development) but an actual, final product, in a professionally finished enclosure and a fancy little wallet!
All this, of course, means that we actually have to settle on a final design for the schematics and that in turn has meant ironing out lots of little bugs and issues. For example, making sure that the Flash memory is connected to a consistent port and whether lines we've tied to power/ground may need to be controlled in future developments. It's a balancing act - getting enough done to meet today's demands, but trying to think about what might be needed in future versions of the product so we can re-use the same products and not have to re-develop the entire thing for a minor change.
The biggest obstacle we've had is stream-writing data to the Flash eeprom chip.
We thought we had this nailed, but when drawing bitmaps back to the screen there were missing pixels in the image. We put this down to a dodgy bitmap drawing routine and decided it would be easily fixed. It turns out, that the problem was actually with the Flash/memory writing routines and we had big gaps in our bitmap data!
That in turn has meant rebuilding the device pretty much from the ground up to try to isolate where the problem stemmed from (after all this, there was a bug in the VB app we used to send data to the ScoreSure device, not the actual device itself!). It was a worthwhile exercise, however, because our written design - the electrical schematic we sent for production - has changed quite a bit since we've gone back and had to re-think everything.
But - finally - we have a working ScoreSure device. One that can display menus as well as bitmaps. You can even edit menu entries so we have a mechanism for editing player details.
We're off to fill up on coffee and get back to the grindstone.
In the meantime, here's a screenie showing working bitmaps on the QVGA LCD screen.
And for regular readers of the blog, who may be asking "what about the online Google-maps-based golf course editor"? (all two of you) here's a link to try out latest development: http://www.scoresure.co.uk/googlemaps.htm
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