Yet another microcontroller board

Archive New Product Ideas
1

Nothing about this idea is particularly revolutionary, but I would certainly find it useful.

How about board that:

-Pulls out all the pins of one of the higher-end 8-bit microcontrollers (perhaps an XMega?).

-Provides an RS232/RS485 driver for the UART

-Uses a reasonably large voltage regulator (enough to power small peripherals like rotary encoders and such)

-Provides a JTAG header so you don’t have to make a wiring harness.

I’m bothering to post this because I found that I kept ordering BDMicro’s Mavric IIb microcontroller board for various tasks… They were very convenient because they had lots of I/O, and an easy way to get it off the system. Now the ATmega they use is obsolete, they’ve remained rather expensive, and I doubt they’re planning to update the design.

On a related subject, are there any decent XMega boards on the market yet?

Thanks.

2

It isn’t very popular, because of supply problems and all the bugs.

3

Sparkfun has an XMega breakout board [here.](SparkFun XMega100 Breakout - BOB-09546 - SparkFun Electronics)

4

leon_heller:
It isn’t very popular, because of supply problems and all the bugs.

Can anyone confirm this? Leon has quite a reputation on other forums regarding his opinions about Atmel.

Maybe someone here has firsthand experience with an XMega.

5

See the AVR Freaks forum. There are innumerable complaints there about the XMega chips, many from people who have actually used them.

I actually use AVRs, as well as PICs and many other chips. I’ve got a couple of XMega chips and a partly completed PCB design, I really ought to finish the design and see if they are as bad as they are made out to be.