Good news: the isostick is well on its way! 🙂

I’ve been working so much I forgot to blog! The most recent hold-up has been raw sector support, which required implementing Reed-Solomon encoding, something I had never done before. After looking for some license-compatible example code and coming up dry, I ended up grabbing some books on the topic and after a couple weeks of hard study we now have our own RS encoder.

Shortly after the public beta (it’s coming! I promise!) I plan to do informative blog posts detailing what I’ve learned in building isostick. It has turned out to be far more massive than I could’ve ever anticipated, and the experience I’ve gained is certainly worth it. I will likely start with Galois Fields, work into CRC (used for EDC, Error Detection Codes, in CDROM), then extended Galois Fields and Reed Solomon encoding, then tie all that together by talking about the CDROM specification, ECMA-130. Later I may also write about the workings of the FAT filesystem, and perhaps others.

It’s worth noting that Atmel has released a new AVR Studio 5 beta and it’s friggin’ beautiful. Simultaneously they released a new AVR Software Framework (included in the AVR Studio download), and it is leaps and bounds ahead of their previous library. Sorry Atmel, the old lib was practically write-only. The new library is nothing short of elegant.

That said, I should get back to hacking on this code!