I did a lot of scoping of the UART driver. And while I got some minor improvements by hand optimizing some slow parts, the driver is still not super swift. I still have a few questions, about some things, but I also added a tweak–I made it possible to suppress echo on gets. Now when the intel hex file goes across, instead of echoing it back, I just output a ‘.’ to show that something was programmed. This makes the process fairly quick. I still need a to improve the speed of the flash activation.

Also, I have been using the native facilities to program the flash. I no longer use the Arduino. The wires between Arduino and the board are soldered into the board, but I have plans for that. But for now, the Arduino is docked to the side of my board. The computer runs with it not powered up.