> How well is sufficiently well?  As far as I'm concerned, beggars can't be
> choosy.  Getting someone to code this project in any programming language
> for the chance at getting dirt (vs. the real value of such code) would be
a
> feat in itself.  Of course, I wouldn't want to code something so massive
in
> assembly language anyway.

I've given this a REALLY good looking over the past few days- the IDE side
of things really isn't difficult to implement- slightly more complex than
talking to an 8 bit LCD, the real killer in the whole thing is implementing
the file system. I've already got a pic talking to an IDE drive to retrieve
number of heads etc.. and it will read and write sectors- although only uses
the first half of every 512 byte sector becuase I'm using any external ram.

What I'm a bit stuck with is how to implement some kind of API so that once
we've got all these nice functions in place for reading and writing files-
people can actually use it easily- whether the pic-ide box becomes a device
on an i2c bus, or if its serial or.. whatever- I really cant think of the
best way to do this bit of the project. I probably shouldnt even be thinking
about it at the moment.

The other thing is is the pic-ide unit going to be standalone and then
directed by some other microcontroler or do we really want to be able to run
our own software on the same pic thats doing the IDE stuff.

I'm keen on doing this in assembly language because Its not going to be
finished in 21 days and I can't afford to buy the compiler.

> Frankly, for a project that is on that large of a scale I don't see the
> payback as being worthwhile.  While it may not be the case, it just
appears
> to me that they are trying to sucker people into doing their hard work for
> them.

I get that feeling too.

Jon Baker
jon@hayseed.net

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