Changes

The FreeIO.org site is now being managed by Steve Rainwater, and served from Network Cybernetics Corporation. Marty may come around now and then, as he is able.

Farewell

Due to pancreatic cancer, Marty will no longer be able to continue developing and releasing new hardware designs on FreeIO.org. The site will be left up, and it should run until the domain registration expires, or the server dies.

Marty (Diehl Martin) has run this site alone since Winter of 2000. He financed all of the projects, and hosted the site at his own expense since then. He has been fighting pancreatic cancer since September of 2004, and the cancer seems to be winning. As such, he is putting his energies elsewhere. For an insight in to what is going on in Marty’s life, visit his personal web page at diehlmartin.com/cancer.html.

GNU/Linux Topics Area Added

I have added an area where various GNU/Linux Topics will be placed. The first of these have to do with installing and running GNU/Linux on a Sun workstation. These industrial-strength systems are available so very inexpensively on the auction sites that it seemed good to show off their easy conversion to running GNU/Linux. Other topics will be added as I get around to writing them up.

Donut USB Interface Development Board

The first of the promised USB development boards has been released. The Donut Board is designed to be an easily expandable board on which to breadboard USB interfaces, in order to ease the development of USB-based devices. The Donut board is based on the Freescale (formerly Motorola) MC68HC908JB8 microcontroller, which has an integrated USB interface, and into which custom built firmware can be downloaded in order to customize the USB interface to user needs. GNU/Linux-based software to control the USB interface from the PC end of the USB link is also under development, based on the great articles by Greg Kroah-Hartman, published during 2004 in Linux Journal.

Site Changes and Other News

Marty has finally completed the course of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and once again feels well enough to do development, both of new hardware and also of the FreeIO.org website itself. Site updates are necessary, as links have changed and web standards have evolved. New web development is being done using the nvu tools, which make good clean html which passes the current correctness tests. You may be assured that there will continue to be no flash, java, javascript, or cookies here. Some old pages will remain unchanged for a while, as there is no pressing reason to revisit them for now. The hardware/firmware/software development is far too interesting to spend too much time in html development!

One more minor thing is worth mentioning. We have had such abysmal problems with web hosts, that we are how hosting this site internally. It is being served off of an old Sun Ultra-5 running GNU/Linux and Apache, using a business DSL line. Any slowdown you may see is due to DSL bandwidth limiting, as the old 270 MHz Sun running apache/linux can completely fill a 100x faster pipe serving static pages like this.