The Maxim MAX6675 and the newer MAX31855 thermocouple to SPI interface chips are very popular with electronics enthusiasts because of their extreme ease of use combined with good accuracy.
Both devices however are only available in SMD package making breadboard prototyping very difficult without using a suitable breakout PCB. Standard thermocouple connectors are also not breadboard friendly further aggravating the issue.
After about a year of development and 3 release candidates, the SDCC team has released the new 3.1.0 version of this great multi platform cross compiler for MCUs. This version supports: 8051, DS390, Z80, HC08, and PIC MCUs.
Besides the numerous bug fixes here is a list of the important changes since the release 3.0.0 (list taken from SDCC website):
LCD Smartie is a small application for windows that allow the user to display information on a separate text LCD display. In addition to the built-in system information and support for several popular applications it can be extended to display data from any source using plug-ins. This plugin makes available several key GPU parameters querying directly the NVIDIA display driver.
The freescale S08JS series is one of the lowest cost microcontrollers with a hardware USB implementation. The availability of free C development tools (SDCC and Codewarrior) make the S08JS a great candidate to develop all sorts of inexpensive USB gadgets. microJS is a fully functional S08JS minimal system on a PCB less than a square inch. The board headers can be plugged into a breadboard for prototyping or soldered to another PCB for a permanent placement.
flashjs is a command line replacement for the Freescale bootloader GUI (formerly called ICP) utility that allow to flash a blank S08JS USB MCU using the bootloader included in the MCU ROM without the aid of a BDM or any other developer tool.
After more than a year of development and 2 release candidates, the SDCC team has released the new 3.0.0 version of this great multi platform cross compiler for MCUs. This version supports: 8051, DS390, Z80, HC08, and PIC MCUs.
Besides the numerous bug fixes here is a list of the important changes since the release 2.9.0 (list taken from SDCC website):
This patch resolves a video quality bug in PCSX (and derivatives) and since it is a complete rewrite of the mdec.c file it also allow PCSX to be completely licensed under the GPL.
The rewrite is based on an implementation of the AAN (Y. Arai, T. Agui, and M. Nakajima) IDCT algorithm plus some optimizations based on extra information on the coefficient matrices provided by the RLE decoder.
This patch will enhance the X.org 7.1 Matrox Millennium II driver to support the X video (Xv) extension (extremely useful for playing DVDs and other video formats). The extension is implemented as a CPU to Frame Buffer YUV scaling ILOAD. A true overlay was not used because of a Millennium II hardware limitation that would reduce the maximum usable frame buffer to only 4Mb.