There are some changes planned in how things are going to be done around here. I want to streamline things a bit more, and make it easier for people to get involved.

One of the major changes is to move all JeeLabs open source software to GitHub:

The main reason for doing this, is that it makes it much easier for anyone to make changes to the code, regardless of whether these are changes for personal use or changes which you’d like to see applied to the JeeLabs codebase.

For the upcoming Arduino IDE 1.0 release (which appears to break lots of 0022 projects), I’ve moved and converted a couple of JeeLabs libraries so far:

• Ports and RF12 have been merged into a single new library called JeeLib
• the EtherCard and GLCDlib libraries have been moved without name change
• all *.pde files have been renamed to *.ino, the new 1.0 IDE filename extension
• references to WProgram.h have been changed to Arduino.h
• the return type of the write() virtual function has been adjusted
• some (char) casts were needed for byte to fix unintended hex conversion

If you run into any other issues while using this code with the new Arduino IDE 1.0beta2, let me know.

So what does all this mean for you, working with the Arduino IDE and these JeeLabs libraries?

Well, first of all: if you’re using IDE 0022, there’s no need to change anything. The new code on GitHub is only for the next IDE release. The subversion repositories and ZIP archives on the libraries page in the Café will remain as is until at least the end of this year.

New development by yours truly will take place on GitHub, however. This applies to all embedded software as well as the JeeMon/JeeRev stuff.

The new JeeLib should make it easier to use Ports and RF12 stuff – just use #include <JeeLib.h>.

Note that you don’t need to sign up with GitHub to view or download any of the JeeLabs software. The code stored there is public, and can be used by anyone. Just follow the zip or tar links in the README section at the bottom of the project pages, or use git to “clone” a repository.

To follow all my changes on GitHub, you can use this RSS feed. To follow just the changes to JeeLib in slightly more detail, this feed should do the trick.

One of the features provided by GitHub is “Issue Tracking”, i.e. the ability to file bugs, comment on them, and see what has been reported and which ones are still open. This too is open to anyone, but you have to be signed up and logged in to GitHub to submit issues or discuss them.

For questions and support, please continue to use the JeeLabs forum as before. But if you’re really pretty sure there’s a bug in there, you’re welcome to use the issue trackers (as you know, Mr Murphy and me tend to sprinkle bugs around from time to time, just to keep y’all sharp and busy ;)

And if you’d like to suggest a change, consider forking the code on GitHub and submitting a “pull request”. This is GitHub-speak for submitting patches. Small changes (even multiple ones) are more likely to go in than one big sweeping request to change everything. I’m open for suggestions (in fact, I’ve got a couple of patches from people still waiting to be applied), but please do keep in mind that code changes often imply doc changes, as well as making sure nothing breaks under various scenarios.

All in all, I hope that GitHub will help us all keep better track of all the latest changes to the software, work together more actively to fix bugs and add more functionality. I haven’t heard of GitHub ever going offline, but if it ever does, I’ll make sure that the latest code is also available from the JeeLabs servers as backup.

Update – Here’s an excellent article on how to collaborate via Git and GitHub.