Comments on: uDuino

By: tymm

tymm — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:10:59 +0000

That’s not really too surprising — breadboards have a lot of stray capacitance. it’s generally best to do cap sensing with real PCB’s instead; they don’t have all the extra metal and plastic that will cause problems. even having the chip plugged into a breadboard and having all the circuitry off the board would likely be problematic.

you could probably hand-build an arduino clone on a Radio Shack, etc. PCB and have it work though.

By: S

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:43:41 +0000

Hi Tymm,
I was trying a few things with Arduino’s built in capacitance sensing (arduino.cc/playground/Main/CapSense), but couldnt get it to work on uduino – is that because there are components on the Arduino that miss on the uduino?
Many thanks

By: MyArduino » Arduino Variants

MyArduino » Arduino Variants — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:58:36 +0000

[...] uDuino [...]

By: tymm

tymm — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:50:38 +0000

It would likely be possible, but probably a bit of work — i suspect it would have to be a merging between the atmega168 and atmega8 code, since the atmega32 has older revisions of many of the peripherals (more similar to the atmega8)… though it’s been a while since i’ve really been through the datasheets to do in-depth comparisons. You would need to do work on both the bootloaders and the Arduino core code.

It does seem like the Arduino IDE software is more amenable now to being tweaked to support more chips than it used to be though, especially since the atmega328 support has been included.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:31:25 +0000

Hi – This barebones stuff looks really great. You seem like the kind og guy to ask: would it be problematic to built a duino clone using an ATmega32? I have about 20 of this chips salvaged from some damaged brushless DC motor controllers for borehole pumps. I have an STK 500 kit, so have been able to check that they aren’t fried – some were. Anyway – I thought since the ATmega32 has a superset of the ATmega168 functionality, I might be able to substitute it, but then I guess the firmware won’t work, will it?

Nice blog – thanks.

Doug

By: tymm

tymm — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:35:37 +0000

With newer versions of the Arduino software I believe skip the bootloader & use an AVR programmer instead of the serial cable. Honestly I haven’t really played with that though, so you’d have to look around for the instructions on how to do it.

On the bright side, though, the bootloader step is a lot easier now — from the newer Arduino software, there’s a menu item under tools to burn a bootloader using an ISP programmer, so you don’t need to deal with the command line bits.

I’ll also check out my bootloader burning bits & verify all the steps are there.

By: simon

simon — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:34:55 +0000

This is by the way a useful diagram for the Pin Mapping table above:
http://arduino.cc/en/uploads/Hacking/Arduino-To-Atmega8-Pins.png

By: simon

simon — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:18:36 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for your quick reply! The led didnt blink on plugin it in, so I realized that something might have gone wrong with the bootloader step.
From the Instuctable, I reckoned that the three avrdude commands you describe would put the bootloader on the atmega168. But, I had to get the booloader on myself (which I did through finding the lilypad bootloader folder, then compiling the file by changing Makefile to my avr-isp settings, and using make install. Now it works: BRILLIANT!

I’m not sure why I thought the bootloader would already be on, but is it necessary to do both steps (the three avrdude commands from your instructables, and the Makefile?

One thing I want to ask: I bought two cables for this, the USB TTL cable, and an AVR ISP cable. First I’ve uploaded the bootloader with the AVR cable, and uploaded the Arduino sketch with the USB TTL cable. Is it really necessary to use both, or can one of these tasks also be done by the other cable?

Thanks so much again!

By: tymm

tymm — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:12:21 +0000

Just to be sure —
1) do you have a chip with a bootloader programmed on it?
2) if you have a standard bootloader on the chip, do you have an oscillator connected? otherwise did you make sure to upload a bootloader that doesn’t need one?

It could certainly be a couple of different things, but that’s first bit to verify.

i’d then take a meter and make sure that you’re getting power to the chip (should be 5v between pins 6 & 7). also assuming your LED is hooked up to pin 19 (Digital Pin 13), it should blink when you first connect the USB cable, when the bootloader starts. (of course long pin of the LED should go to the m168′s pin, short pin to ground).

if this doesn’t help, maybe if i saw a picture of how you have things wired up it would help. you can email me at tymm with an othy attached to the end at gmail. (no spaces, underscores, etc, in the address).

By: simon

simon — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:45:37 +0000

Hi,
Ive followed your Instructable, spend a day checking and measuring if everything is well connected, but when I try to upload i keep getting:
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding
I’m using osx 10.5, an atmega168 and arduino0013 alpha, and am trying to upload Blink example.
I’ve tried all the serialports and boards, also tried the change of boards.txt at
http://www.creatrope.com/blog/make/uduino-arduino-board-support/
But keep getting the same error. Would you have an idea what I’m doing wrong?