D-Brick your AVR

Posted on September 15, 2011 by admin

The other day I bricked 2 atmega8 chips in a row by setting the fuses to some unworkable combination that or my crystals were not working properly in the prototyping socket for some reason. Eventually I found a solution here http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/260.html. The way they solved this was to clock the chip with a simple logic level pulse to xtal1(pin 9 on the atmega8)  some where in the neighborhood of 1Mhz and then program and reset the fuses as normal.

Posted in Atmel, Microcontroller | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

chipKIT uno32

Posted on September 14, 2011 by admin

I received a Digilent chipKIT uno32 Arduino compatible board today. At $26.95 it bests the Atmel based offerings in any metric I can think of including price. The board packs a 80MHz Pic32 core 16K SRAM and 128K Flash with 42 digital I/O lines and 10bit 1MHz Analog to Digital conversion. This is a painless and very substantial upgrade for those that work primarily in the Arduino IDE I was able to work out the boards IO using Firmata, and capture data data from a GPS module using code written for Arduino with out any problem. I can’t imagine using an Atmel based arduino boards in the future unless there is some development from the Atmel camp or I just had to target Atmel for some reason.

I will be writing about Firmata more in the future it allows you to use microcontrollers as general Digital Acquisition and IO boards using a standardized interface. It allows the developers to treat the microcontroller like a peripheral and leaves them to build the intelligence on the PC side and provides some independence as to what microcontroller are used.

 

Posted in Microcontroller, New Product | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments