I submitted this project to the Hackaday Prize 2016 because I welcome incentives to turn it into a full spin-off of the #YASEP Yet Another Small Embedded Processor project. Now I see it is tangled in a web of co-dependencies with other subprojects and co-projects such as #Raspbian Squeezed.

What works ?

At home, it works great on a Raspberry Pi model B, using an obsolete version of the YASEP web interface, based on the the old #YGWM Whygee's JavaScript Window Manager system. The flashing algorithm is great (better than my commercial chinese flasher) and the source code is available from the main yasep.org project base (see links on the project page)

What is missing ?

You know the saying, if it ain't broken, don't fix it ? Well it works for me so why work further ?

The problems however are piling up and might break the whole thing one day or another.

• The Raspberry Pi hardware is not the stable, trusted platform it seemed to be. New PCB versions and new CPUs have been introduced at (relatively) breakneck speed and I assume it will continue (until the Pi foundation throws the towel).
  I have not yet updated my custom SPI routines to adjust the IO address of the SPI hardware. Why did they change it in the PI2 ?
  Anyway, it's one of the first things to do, but it requires non-insignificant attention and testing. I have already too many projects and I ain't even working on the side or being paid so...
  UPDATE20161106: I'm adding new sub-projects #C GPIO library for Raspberry Pi, #HYX file format and soon the SPI library.
• The OS is not stable either. Raspbian has evolved a lot and even changed face. It has bloated and this has raised many concerns, not just from me. A reliable, small-footprint Linux is needed and maintaining the #SPI Flasher involves restarting a full system install every 6 months or so, which takes a day or three to get right. Scripting does not help when the OS modifies this and that in my back :-(
  Without this, the only way to run a SPI flasher is to install a vanilla image, log in with SSH and run the commands on the command line. Which is slower than the intended method through the web browser. Oh wait, that's another story.
• The #YGWM Whygee's JavaScript Window Manager must be rewritten from scratch. That's a few months of work, that I don't have :-(

So for a winning entry in the HaD contest, I can't submit the project as it was intended, I must reduce the ambitions. But I've already gone pretty far since the beginning of this project :-)

Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to provide a pre-configured image to flash on your SD card with instant boot to the desired functionality. But this looks more and more like shooting many moving targets at the same time. I can adapt things here and there, YGWM is a project that I fully control and will develop, but I am growing tired of having to play catch with the Pi Foundation's whims.

Of course the solution would be to have a working #YASEP Yet Another Small Embedded Processor but I must bootstrap the whole platform somehow, somewhere.