Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Arduino/Leduino mechanical drawing

The Arduino concept, and our own LEDuino, have been a great success. But one persistent difficulty I see is the lack of an accurate board outline drawing. At least supposedly "authorative" template I have seen had errors. So based on the Eagle files of the official Arduino Diecimila I created a layer in my EDA package that has the dimensions that as far as I can tell are accurate. This PDF file is a copy of that layer. Unfortunately I do not use Eagle but if you do, feel free to translate my drawing and I can happily post it on my site if you want.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Atmel Xmega - some more thoughts

Work continues here in the background on a small development platform based on the ATXmega128A1. One very interesting point which becomes salient with these devices is the peripheral multiplexing issue. Until now the functions available on each pin were minimal - you used a pin as IO or you might assign it to a timer, or a UART.

But with the Xmega we have more choices, how many UARTs can we use while using various SPI or TWI ports? Which functionality do we lose by choosing some other function? Lots of fun and something that we have been insulated from in the AVR world.

Friday, July 25, 2008

LEDuino in the wild.

Well, the first LEDuinos are making their way into the wild. The very first shipment went to Australia. I hope the unit enjoys going back to my home country! Response so far has been very gratifying. We are working on some application examples using the LEDuino specific capabilities, more news soon.