My buddy Wayne Yamaguchi sent a little update on making printed circuit boards (PCBs) at home. Wayne always was the expert on toner transfer PCBs. This is where you print your Gerber art on a special film. Then you use an iron or a hot roller to transfer the printer toner from the plastic film […]
My buddies Francis Lau and Wayne Yamaguchi read my recent article about the 12-bit ADCs in the new Atmel SAM D20 ARM chip. They both had some good tips. Francis has worked for a famous Silicon Valley brain-wave sensor company. He writes: I was trying to squeeze out more resolution out of a 10-bit adc […]
I had lunch with my pal Wayne Yamaguchi last week, who has several products he makes based on Atmel AVR parts. Wayne mentioned that he has found products where someone has forgotten to burn the fuse and lock bits, and he could read the code inside the part. He admits that it is easy to […]
I had lunch with my buddy Wayne Yamaguchi last week. He showed me the latest upgrades on an Atmel-powered nightlight he has designed. I met Wayne when I was consulting at HP in the late ‘90s. He took an interest in LEDs and left Agilent when he started making more money selling kits to convert […]
When you use solder paste to assemble your prototype PCB (printed circuit board) you need a stencil or hypodermic needle to apply the paste to the pads on the board. Then you use an IR (infra-red) reflow oven to melt the solder. Scott Fritz, an Atmel IC designer on the third floor, found this neat […]
Atmel just released a new Atmel | SMART ARM-based microcontroller. While the SAM L21 has the performance of a Cortex M0+ core, it also packs a number of ultra-low-power features. The MCU can even do touch sensing for buttons, sliders, and wheels while using extremity low power. One key component is there are five distinct power domains inside the […]
While some of my earlier segments with Vegard explored the history of AVR, this video with its co-inventor addresses its product line and the tools one would use to write the firmware for the 8-bit chips. Vegard touches on the availability of AVR chips in DIP (dual in-line) packages. These larger packages are loved by Makers and hobbyists since they are […]
We were lucky enough to drag Vegard Wollan into the Atmel Studio while he was visiting headquarters from Norway a few weeks ago. For those of you who may not know, Vegard is commonly believed to be the “V” in AVR. After having spent hours in the Studio, we decided to break the film into separate segments — this […]
I just made a spreadsheet of all the tinyAVR parts. All my pals love the MCU selector guide, but I have a lot of analog dinosaur buddies that prefer a spreadsheet to a web-based interface. You can sort the data and this spreadsheet has the filter box on the columns, so you can sort out […]
While at the EELive! conference last week I met up with the PCB-POOL folks. I first heard about this PCB fab house from my buddy Wayne Yamaguchi. Despite their being located in Ireland, Wayne said they were getting the prototype boards to him in a week. Best yet, at that time, they did not charge […]
Atmel | Bits & Pieces 