Dwarf V0.2 beta 1 release

For the impatient:

Download

I've been working on improvements to Dwarf for a while. Check out the github repo for detailed changes and current development release. This is a beta release, i.e. it NEEDS TESTING. I've used it a little for actual projects and seems to be working okay but it certainly hasn't been extensively tested.

Major Changes
The manual connect button has been removed.
I've never used this button and felt it complicated the interface. The only reason you're likely to miss this is if you were using Dwarf to program serial EEPROMs which don't auto-detect like PICs. If you're working at that level I'm hoping you can use the command line instead. If you used this feature LET ME KNOW! I can add it again.

The compile button has been removed
The compile button was largely useless. Due to the way gpasm/gplink work you could not even use the RES directive to dynamically assign registers and had to do all development in a single file to use this compile button. I looked into implementing a project management mode that would allow multi-file compilation and linking but this added far too much complexity as Dwarf is meant to be very simple. (There may well be a more sophisticated "integrated environment" under development that will do compilation properly, watch this space!)

Alterations to the UI
The file open button has been altered to get around a bug in file type filters in GTK itself. The functionality has not been significantly altered just the widget set and hence the appearance to a certain extent. The chip model is no longer editable in line with the new auto-only connect mode. The exit button has been altered to be a standard stock-icon. This should mean it gets translated with the UI theme.

Other features

• Can now be called from outside the directory as image paths are found relative to script location not current working directory.
• Source has been tidied up significantly.
• Improved command line argument handling. As well as the debugging -v option there is now a --help option to display usage information.
• Improved enabling/disabling of functions. The buttons are now more reliably enabled/disabled when they can be used (e.g. program only active when a file is selected and PICKit is connected.)
• Read PIC now shows a save dialogue to select where to save to rather than always saving to dump.hex

Still to do
Before the final 0.2 release I need to update the documentation and significant testing needs to be done. An install script for pk2cmd is being written and I'm considering wrapping up Dwarf in a .deb for Ubuntu/Debian users.

For you to do
Please try out this software and give me feedback particularly bug reports and feature request. You can contact me by posting a response, by email or Twitter.