Project AKO News

26 Aug 2001
Added support for receiving the ISE protocol extension in the CIF's AKONET stack, and for sending it in the AKOI2C device driver. ISE (Immediate Success Extension) is a nifty extension to the data link layer of the AKONET that provides immediate feedback about whether a messages was received intact (i.e. proper framing, proper length, proper checksum). It's not implemented as described in the AKONET (a.k.a. AKO protocol) document. The new implementation is far cooler, because it actually can catch all errors, and it is fully backwards compatible with non-ISE components. You can send ISE framed messages to a component that does not implement ISE, or send non-ISE framed messages to a component that implements ISE, and everything works as expected. The method I described in the AKO protocol document couldn't catch some framing errors, and was not backwards compatible with the non-ISE version of the protocol. Now I'm going to be forced to update that document ^_^. BTW, the ISE stuff is in CVS (changes in both ako and akoi2c). gw
02 Aug 2001
Rolled a release of Project AKO just now. It's mainly just the component firmware. I've also created two mailing lists, one for development and use of the AKOI2C (ako-akoi2c), and one for general Project AKO development (ako-devel). Access to these lists is available from the Project AKO Sourceforge Page.
On the technical side, the fixes I made to AKOI2C device driver a couple of days ago have vastly improved the system. I was banging on a setup as hard as I could for over 36 hours without even a hiccup. I also fixed a bug in the components I2C stack, that caused a problem with components sending the INIT_MSG properly. With the low level stuff working well now, I can devote more time to the higher level AKOLIB and AKOAPI. gw
01 Aug 2001
Got the component firmware and some of the boards into CVS in the module "ako". Also has the start of the akolib. I messed up when I imported it, so you might want to add the "-P" option to your "co" to avoid the duplicate directory structure inside there.
Made some fixes to the AKOI2C Linux device driver in CVS, so it works much much much better. It's really just temporary workarounds for problems that need to be fixed in the AKOI2C. But I can now go off and do other cool stuff with the system before I have to fix the problem on the firmware side. Some modifications Chris made to the PC-AKO reset circuitry have also really improved the stability and robustness of the I2C interface. This change isn't in CVS yet, though.
Chris is working on a total rewrite of the device driver. Hopefully that version will functioning soon and in CVS.
22 Jul 2001
First release of the AKOI2C firmware and Linux drivers, available from the SourceForge AKO page. gw
18 Jul 2001
Finally got some Project AKO webpages up, with lots of photos. More information and source code coming soon. gw