As David Johnson-Davies explains in his newest Technoblogy submit, Adafruit’s Feather format is considered one of his favourite board kind elements. Nevertheless, the Microchip AVR128DA microcontroller, considered one of his favourite microcontrollers, wasn’t out there as a Feather board. So he created his personal!
Measuring 0.9 x 2.0”, the Feather is sufficiently small to suit on a breadboard, whereas giant sufficient for a enough array of IO pins. Since Adafruit printed the Feather commonplace, DJD was in a position to simply combine the AVR128DA into this footprint, giving him a place to begin and entry to FeatherWing add-on modules. The AVR128DA chip options 128KB of flash and 16KB of RAM, making the brand new board ideally suited for working his uLisp interpreter.
DJD fulfilled the usual Feather specs, reminiscent of a JST LiPo connector, reset button, 3.3V logic, six analog pins, and 7 GPIO pins. He additionally added a microSD card socket (for saving Lisp packages and knowledge), a mini NeoPixel, and an analog pin linked to VBAT through a voltage divider for battery monitoring. The circuit diagram is offered within the writeup, and the design information are out there on GitHub if you wish to duplicate and/or study his board.
DJD additionally outlines the way to set up a bootloader on the AVR128DA28, permitting customers to add packages from the Arduino IDE, and presents an enhanced blinky sketch for testing. This outputs “SOS” in Morse Code as a substitute of the usual repeating (and, one may argue, type of boring) on/off sequence. Lastly, he goes over utilizing the uLisp interpreter, and even outlines the way to combine meeting code into your routine.
The AVR128DA32 Feather seems to be like a variety of enjoyable. It’s additionally an excellent reminder to think about if you need to use an current board format, fairly than beginning one thing completely from scratch!
