UPDI – Unified Program and Debug Interface – is the new programming and debugging interface on new ATtiny MCUs from Microchip. The UPDI requires just a single pin on the MCU, so it is very suitable for low-pin count chips.… Continue Reading
I created a smal 100x100mm PCB mini-panel of some of the SMT breakout boards from Adafruit. Each mini-panel contains: 3x SOIC-20 (A-side) and TSSOP-20 (B-side) 5x SOIC-16 (A-side) and TSSOP-16 (B-side) 5x SOIC-8 (A-side) and MSOP-8 (B-side) 4x SOIC-8 (A-side)… Continue Reading
Here you can find documentation about my DIY Analog Curve Tracer.
New AVR processors from Microchip/Atmel use a 1-wire UPDI interface for flash programming. You could use either AVR ICE or Pickit 4 as the “official” programmers (I did not test any of them). Both of these cost >50 EUR. A… Continue Reading
NXP’s PN7120 is NFC controller for contactless communication at 13.56MHz. It interfaces with the host CPU via the I2C bus. The I2C slave address of PN7120 is 0b010100Lx, where L is a configurable LSB of the address (by pin B2,… Continue Reading
Once upon a time, I decided it is a good time to upgrade the version of gcc compiler we use in our ARM926-based firmware project. Historically, this project uses gcc version 4.6, which is quite outdated nowadays (January 2018). In… Continue Reading
The X86 has always supported unaligned accesses. In the ARM world the first architecture that supported unaligned accesses in hardware was ARMv6. The architecture was implemented in the ARM11 core around the year 2002 and onward. There is an excellent… Continue Reading
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on Ethernet RMII. In Part 1 I described my hardware setup and basic Ethernet operation. In the second and final part I will describe the design of specialized MAC cores I implemented… Continue Reading
This is Part 1 of the two-part series on Ethernet RMII. Part 2 is also available. Imagine your application requires a non-standard periphery controlled by an embedded processor. What options do you have? The periphery can be implemented in an… Continue Reading
How to export PCB design from the free Altium Circuit Maker v1.0.4 so that it can be submitted to OSH Park fab. This took me an evening to figure out; OSH Park service was bitching about missing “outline” and/or drill… Continue Reading