Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Here's some world music from the "Nour" album of Shiva in Exile. Enjoy!

Song: Shiva in Exile - He'neya (4:20 min, 2.4 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 1.0
Source: magnatune.com
Purchase from: Magnatune

Here's a quick introduction to using a cheap FTDI FT2232H based module (left-hand side on the photo) as a JTAG programmer together with the OpenOCD JTAG software for ARM and MIPS devices. The module I am using for thіs purpose is a DLP Design DLP-USB1232H, which is available from various sources (Digikey, Mouser, Saelig, and probably others) for 20-30 bucks plus shipping, depending on where you live.

By properly connecting the correct pins of the DLP-USB1232H to the target JTAG
device (I used an Olimex STM32-H103 eval board for testing) you can easily abuse the DLP-USB1232H as JTAG programmer. As I chose the proper DLP-USB1232H GPIOs for the TRST and (S)RST pins, OpenOCD even worked out of the box, without having to change a single line of code.

The only thing that's required is to provide OpenOCD with an interface config file that uses the usbjtag "layout". I have already submitted that config file upstream, I guess it should be merged soonish.

The usage is then pretty simple:

  $ openocd -f interface/dlp-usb1232h.cfg -f board/olimex_stm32_h103.cfg

And in another xterm:

  $ telnet localhost 4444
  > init
  > reset halt
  > flash write_image erase fancyblink.bin 0x08000000
  > reset

This flashes the given fancyblink.bin image onto the STM32-H103 eval board via the DLP-USB1232H JTAG programmer, where fancyblink.bin is an example program from my libopenstm32 project (that aims to create a full-blown firmware library for ST STM32 microcontrollers, similar to what avr-libc does for AVRs). Contributions for libopenstm32 (license is GPLv3 or later) are highly welcome btw., hint hint...

  $ git clone git://libopenstm32.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libopenstm32/libopenstm32

Full schematics, datasheets, and detailed instructions for the JTAG programmer are available from a small page I created in my Random Projects wiki, which is intended for the various smaller projects I'm working on that don't warrant getting their own domain, wiki, etc:

• http://randomprojects.org/wiki/DLP-USB1232H_and_OpenOCD_based_JTAG_adapter

The Random Projects wiki is open-for-all btw, feel free to use it for any freeish, software or hardware projects of your own if you want.

Anyway, the DLP-USB1232H is a really nice device as it can also be used for many other purposes, such as USB-to-Serial or SPI BIOS chip programming, but more on that in another blog post...

Nice track from Saros, hope you like it.

Song: Saros - The Incomplete Cloth (7:08 min, 4.0 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 1.0
Source: magnatune.com
Purchase from: Magnatune

After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it.

The choice of service was pretty obvious — while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed.

The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:

 $ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.git

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice.

identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

Dear Lazyweb,

is there any Free Software utility for putting those nice logos/images on LightScribe CDs or DVDs? I'm considering buying such a CD/DVD burner, but only if there's open-source software to control the device. I guess burning CDs/DVDs should be no problem using wodim/cdrecord, but adding images as labels on the CD/DVD is likely not possible without special software.

I know about the LightScribe Linux software (which is binary-only and not open-source, it seems) and LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux (which only creates labels but does not write them to the CD/DVD, and is not open-source either, I think).

Anyone aware of a Free Software utility for this? Or at least a public specification/datasheet which could be used for creating one? I might even be willing to join development if datasheets are available.