3 Nov
2011
3 Nov
'11
4:29 a.m.
On Thu, 3 Nov 2011, Philip Pemberton wrote:
On 02/11/11 23:46, Mouse wrote:
There is always the DiscFerret: http://www.discferret.com/
The entire hardware design is open source (I don't even mind people making
DiscFerret boards themselves -- as long as they don't go selling them as
"official" DiscFerrets). Same goes for the software -- Apache licence for the
APIs, and the rest of the software (including PIC microcontroller firmware
and FPGA microcode) is GPLV2 "or any later version."
As for operating system support? It runs on Linux and Mac OS X natively, and
work is underway to resurrect the Windows/mingw32 and Cygwin ports (which
haven't been tested particularly well due to USB driver issues).
There's a healthy discussion going on in #discferret on irc.freenode.net, and
a mailing list for DiscFerret users and software developers (which is
considerably quieter). The latter is linked from the main website (see link
above).
Has anyone developed support that can pull sector images from discferret
yet? I was hoping to find time to work on this, but LIFE(tm) has gotten
in the way. I haven't honestly had much of a chance to hack on it :-(.
Last I knew, it was capable only of pulling a flux-transition stream and
analyzing statistics on it.
Steve
--
There is
nothing stopping you from using your own software with the
board. I could say "why not use our firmware", but that would be a
binary again and you said you don't run precompiled software.
I do accept it for firmware under some circumstances, such as the
firmware in disk drives and the like.
In this case, if the interface your firmware presents to the host is
documented, I very well might be willing to do exactly that. (I don't
_like_ it, especially not as compared to open-source code, but I'm not
as dogmatic and strident about it as I am when it comes to software
running on the host.)