I’m sure at this point, many of you are wondering what has happened to LameStation. I have been MIA for the most part for the past few months, but with good reason. I figure now is as good a time as any to tell you what’s up.
In November, LameStation development took a detour when the developer of PropellerIDE abandoned the project and left it without a maintainer.
For those of you who don’t know, PropellerIDE was to be the cross-platform replacement for the PropTool, Parallax’s official offering for a Spin language code editor.
One of the guiding principles of the LameStation project is that every tool used in its development must be open-source and cross-platform. This policy came after my use of Altium Designer for the original LameStation project resulted in being unable to continue hardware development after the license expired (which resulted in a 2-year project hiatus among other reasons…).
So today, I am proud to say that the entire hardware and software stack is built using entirely free tools that are available across the board! But that comes at a price.
As a LameStation developer, you spend 95% of your time staring at an editor screen, so with:
- PropTool being Windows-only,
- SimpleIDE having dropped Spin support,
- and Brad’s Spin Tool being closed-source,
I was pretty heavily dependent on PropellerIDE being the backbone of the new LameStation SDK.
So I was a little panicked when I didn’t hear from the developer for a month.
I was not prepared to take on this task, but when no other developers stepped forward, I had no choice, so I agreed to do it.
I have not regretted it. Now that LameStation has taken over this project, PropellerIDE can truly grow become what I need it to be to successfully support the LameStation project, and it has added considerable value to the platform.
I am also very grateful to be able to say that Parallax has been generous in sponsoring the continued development of this IDE, which has allowed me to fully and totally commit myself to bringing it to life as fast as I can.
I know this has been a major delay in LameStation development, but in the end it will be worth it if doing so will allow me to deliver a solid, reliable, feature-rich SDK for all of you to enjoy.
So bear with me. I will never give up on bringing the LameStation to life. :)