[TriEmbed] ATMEGA 1284p "Mighty Mini"

[Jon Wolfe]

I love the Mega 1284. But the 1284 is also the biggest 8 bit AVR chip 
that comes in a DIP form factor.  I run them at 20Mhz in breadboards all 
the time with just a xtal and loading caps, and I even have a home-made 
JTAG-breadboard adapter for them, inspired by this 
http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=550

If it's already going the SMD route, I wonder if the Mighty Mini would 
work with the new Mega 2564. It's sort of the upgrade to the 1284, and 
so far it doesn't come in DIP form. It's got an insane 32kb of sram, and 
256kb of flash. The 2564 also is marketed as a device for RF 
applications, I think at least a variant of it has built-in Zigbee, or 
hardware to talk to a Zigbee device. I'm also not sure if they make 5V 
version of the 2564, they all seem to run at 3.3V, with a max clock of 
16Mhz.

The other potential chip would be the 2560 used in the Arduino Mega. 
It's got the flash, but only 8kb of sram. The 2560 does have an external 
sram interface though, so you could have potentially 64kb (or more if 
you "bank switch", there are shields for the Arduino Mega that do 
this).The AVR parallel memory interface also uses around 18 I/O lines 
too, so there's that. It's hard to add too much to an AVR based board 
these days without hitting the point where a Cortex-M based design would 
be a better choice.

There are seveal XMega's that could potentially work too, but I don't 
know nearly as much about xmegas.


On 2015-04-09 13:19, Alex Davis wrote:
> Martin,
> 
> there's nothing on-board which should cause an issue with power-saving.
> There is no FTDI chip, a only 5-pin header to attach to an external
> USB-to-serial adapter. Some people might prefer an 8 MHz crystal vs. 16
> MHz, but you can always set the fuse bits to use the internal RC
> oscillator and get 8 MHz. There's an amber LED on the SCK line with a 
> 1K
> resistor to ground. That would only matter if you left it high and went
> to sleep. You can easily remove it with a soldering iron if you want.
> 
> I will be bringing my board to the next meeting. It's a cool board - my
> thanks to Jack Christensen for sharing it on OSHPark. I can talk about
> the aspect of soldering the SMT parts. It's actually much easier than
> through-hole once you do a few.
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 13:47:38 -0400
> From: Martin Brooke <martin.brooke at duke.edu>
> To: TriEmbed Discussion <triembed at triembed.org>
> Subject: Re: [TriEmbed] ATMEGA 1284p "Mighty Mini"
> Message-ID:
> 	<CALjzumpMQzbMS2C3eeuooMNHbX=wKNgErmYmFHL7mk=BaMi=8Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Does it have anything on it that would interfere with Low power modes?
> 
> Sound like no regulator what about  other chips?
> 
> I would love a bare bones board that supported more RAM and Program but
> could be put to sleep.
> 
> Martin

-- 
Jon Wolfe
Anibit Technology LLC.

https://anibit.com