Time for a brief update on various projects.

NTP Server is fairly close to final. I didn't manage to knock off actually committing to the 1.4 design I have, but it did have a few tweaks. Primarily fixed up the positioning of the RTC crystal so it's lying flat instead of vertical so it's a bit more secure.

I've also finally decided that I won't switch away from the MCP2200 USB Serial bridge on this revision. There was some consideration of switching to a mega 16u2 and using LUFA (an open-source USB stack for AVR MCUs) but I still have a stack of MCP2200's and they basically are a known quantity.

2.0 also had a bit of a touch up, as I try to figure out what I want from it. The intention with 2.0 is fit into a larger case with a bit of a display. It's also likely to have some end plates out of plastic cut by Ponoko. The short term plan is prototype the end plates quickly and figure out if the display design will work at all before actually getting the PCB made. (Cut plastic from Ponoko and one case is vastly cheaper as a loss than a stack of PCBs!)

Still undecided is the core platform choice. The easy path will be XMEGA A3 or D3, building off the progress on 1.4. The harder choices are either switching up to A1 (given the utter failure to get any A3's shipped to me, I suspect not) and seeing how badly 0.5mm TQFP goes, or if I'm going to do that going back into the rabbit hole of ARM Cortex M3 choices (ie, LPC1768/STM32F107/SAM3S, or one of their newer friends). Now there's going to be a SAM3S based Arduino, could be a good starting place.

LUFA AVR ISPmkII Clone project is still in the shuffling pieces around. Since I've gotten myself a real AVR ISPmkII the primary reason for building the project would be getting comfortable with LUFA for other projects. It's also a simple enough board it would be an okay base for either a live demo of SMD soldering or a tutorial, which I'm attempting to get accepted for the Arduino miniconf at LCA2012.

The big issue at the moment with the board is whether it's really useful to others (the same issue I had with the Breadboard PSU project) and the slightly harder to solder 0.65mm TSOP logic level shifter on the design. It's required to ensure it can be used on a wide variety of AVR chips (since, they vary in target voltages), but I've had grief with parts that fine before.