I was hopeful today when I discovered that FTDI had released a new version of their toolchain and firmware for the VNC2. As mentioned previously, I have been having a large number of problems with my rhythm controller adapter application, due largely to bugs and lack of features in the 1.2.2-SP1 version that had been current until today.

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My hope lasted only a very short time.

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The immediate problem I had been working on was with link-time optimizations producing bogus output. In 1.4.0, the GUI option to select link time optimization was removed, but the command line tool still supported it and produced corrupted output. Half points.

Then, as soon as I tried to reproduce the most critical of my issues I started having real fun. First, the compiler just segfaulted trying to compile my source. Then, once I had narrowed down the code which caused it to crash I fired up a new project so as to create the minimal reproduction recipe. However, the fresh project didn’t compile due to a trivial symbol mismatch in some FTDI generated code. Finally, after fixing that, I went to rename my reproduction recipe for transmission, and discovered that 1.4.0 started encoding absolute file paths into the .vproj files so that you can’t easily move or rename projects any more.

Ick!

Eventually, I will get around to testing all of my existing issues with the new toolchain, although it may take a bit as many of the FTDI provided examples have been re-worked to rely on the more advanced evaluation boards like the Vinculo, not my V2DIP2. At least that is my current theory, we’ll see as I dig in more.