Bajduino 1284

ATmega1284 breakout board

I’m back home after a 4 week vacation in Thailand. While I was there I ordered some more components from Tayda Electronics and had them delivered to my hotel. This time I received my order in 3 days instead of the 2 – 3 weeks it normally takes for shipments from Asia to Belgium. I needed some more components to make my Bajduino’s 🙂 Just before I went on vacation I ordered 10 PCB’s for my Bajduino 1284. It’s just a simple breakout board for the ATmega1284P-PU with a 5V regulator and the necessary components to make the micro controller work. Since the ATmega1284P-PU comes in a 40 pin DIP package I could mount the crystal and caps inside the socket, this saves some PCB space. The board turned out to be not much bigger then an Arduino Duemilanove/Uno. I soldered one PCB and put the big micro controller in the socket to start testing. I had already bootloaded one chip on a breadboard some time ago. So I used my FTDI cable to upload some sketches. Everything worked fine 🙂 Since I have 5 ATmega1284P-PU’s I decided to test if the ICSP header worked. I used my USBasp programmer to bootload the 4 blank chips with Manicabugs mighty 1284p bootloader. This was the first time I used my USBasp but all 4 the chips bootloaded fine. So now I have 5 ATmega1284P-PU’s with working Arduino bootloaders on them 🙂 To remove the chips I used my IC puller, a real handy tool to remove IC’s from their socket. Certainly with a big 40 pin chip like the ATmega1284P-PU you always take the risk of bending the pins when removing them from their socket. The IC puller makes this task a lot more easy and less risky to bend or break the pins. I plan on using the Bajduino 1284 in one of my upcoming robots. The ATmega1284P-PU has 2 serial ports so it’s ideal to use with the serial servo controller I have.

While I was away on vacation another package arrived … my long awaited Raspberry Pi. After almost 2 months it finally made it here. I’ve not had time to play with it yet. I haven’t even downloaded a linux distro to run on it. There seems to be quite a few flavours of GNU Linux for the Raspberry Pi today. So I will need to take a look at them and make a choice. I bought the Raspberry Pi from RS components and ordered some accessories with it. I bought a strong USB adapter to power it and a HDMI cable since the Raspberry Pi only has HDMI output. I don’t have a TV where I will play and test with the Raspberry so I also got a HDMI to DVI converter to connect it to one of my LCDs.

Finally received a Raspberry Pi 🙂