As Martin points out, Atmel’s 8- and 32-bit microcontrollers have been the MCUs of choice for Arduino since the boards first hit the streets for DIY Makers way back in 2005. More specifically, he attributes the success of Arduino to its easy-to-use, free cross-platform toolchain and its simple do-it-yourself packages with Atmel MCUs.
“These factors helped initially steer the Arduino team to choose our AVR microcontrollers – and today, both our AVR and ARM-based MCUs,” Martin explained.
The Atmel MCU Applications Manager also noted that one of the coolest Maker technologies to surface in recent years is 3D printing technology, an industry expected to be worth $3 billion by 2016. To be sure, says Martin, almost every major 3D printer is currently based on Atmel AVR MCUs.
As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, the Maker Movement is growing exponentially by taking advantage of 3D printers, inexpensive microcontrollers, robotics, CAD and the ability to control machines with computers, tablets and smartphones.
According to Larry Magid, a technology journalist who writes for the San Jose Mercury News, we are all Makers to a certain extent, even if some of us don’t know it yet.
“All of us – even Leonardo da Vinci – were late comers as far as the Maker movement is concerned,” he explained. “Our prehistoric ancestors millions of years ago, figured out how to turn stones into tools so that they could make things. Only they didn’t have fairs, books and websites to document the process.”
Similarly, Will.i.am, the technophile founder of The Black Eyed Peas, recently offered a ringing endorsement of the Maker Movement and related culture on Facebook.
“Every young person is going to be inspired to be a maker from now on,” said Will.i.am. “It’s like how everyone used to want to be a musician, an actor, an athlete — but a maker is what people are going to want to be.”
Indeed, as Arduino’s Massimo Banzi once famously noted, “You don’t need anyone’s permission to make something great.”
“Atmel AVRs revolutionized the 8-bit market when it was launched, with single cycle execution, free software tools and large Flash memory options. Since then, Atmel has continued to innovate and gain market share,” writes EDN’s Stephen Evanczuk.
“For the devices that run in the biggest volumes it is never one feature that makes it good as It needs to be successful in many markets to hit the high numbers. Ease of use, high performance, good sales support, high quality levels and on time delivery are essential.”
As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel’s current generation of AVR 8- and 32-bit microcontrollers compliment our ARM MCU and microprocessors (MPUs) to deliver a unique combination of performance, power efficiency and design flexibility. Simply put, no other microcontrollers deliver more computing performance with better power efficiency.
In the first part of this series, we took a closer look at how Atmel’s AVR low-power 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) help enable the implementation of various product-differentiating features, including advanced control algorithms, voice control and capacitive touch sensing.
Today we will take an in-depth look at how Atmel’s AVR low-power 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) help streamline automotive development. As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, evaluating current-gen microcontroller architecture requires a complete development environment, including an evaluation kit, a software development environment with compiler and debugger, as well as a comprehensive set of application examples, drivers and services.
“[Simply put], Atmel simplifies system development with the AVR Software Framework, which supports a variety of optimized interface drivers peripheral firmware, and application code – including extensive motor control algorithms, capacitive touch drivers, advanced digital signal processing algorithms (i.e., FFTs and filters such as band-pass, high-pass, and low-pass), commonly used audio and image codecs such as MP3, speech recognition engines, display drivers, and FAT12/16/32 file systems, to name a few,” an Atmel engineering rep told Bits & Pieces.
“For automotive systems, the support with LIN and CAN software stacks, as well as with operating systems such as OSEK, and MCAL layers for the Autosar environment is mandatory. Model-based approaches for the development of automotive applications are becoming more and more popular, and these require additional support of design environments such as MATLAB/Simulink. Atmel AVR MCUs also support real-time trace, enabling full system operation visibility. Plus, updates with new features are available every quarter.”
In terms of software, the intuitive GUI-based Atmel AVR Studio is the industry’s most complete development environment for 8- and 32-bit applications, offering full compiler and debugger support for all AVR microcontrollers. Since peripherals are configured using the AVR Software Framework, migration between different AVR devices is truly seamless.
Atmel also supplies a wide range of hardware-based tools for in-system programming, debugging, and evaluation. The AT32UC3C-EK evaluation kit provides access to the extensive capabilities of the UC3C architecture with out-of-the-box simplicity, with the evaluation kit supporting Atmel QTouch capabilities.
“Specific examples of automotive applications with Atmel’s AVR UC3C include car audio, LED backlighting with a dimming function for the indicators, as well as interfaces for different types of sensors and switches to control the window lifter and the mirror positioning,” the Atmel engineering rep continued.
“Perhaps most importantly, a microcontroller such as the UC3C—with peripheral integration and extended processing capacity—allows an entire system architecture to be consolidated onto a single chip.”
The long-awaited 2013 World Maker Faire kicks off September 21st in the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI). We’ll be there at the Atmel booth in the Arduino pavilion. Will you? Don’t worry if you can’t make it to out to the Big Apple, because you can still follow all the goings on via Twitter – just look for the hashtags @makerfaire, @atmel and @arduino.
For those of you attending the Faire, Atmel’s booth will be taking center stage at the show with a number of uber-cool exhibits and demos including:
Hexbug/hovercraft hacking: Watch Atmel employees hack traditional Hexbugs and hovercrafts using Arduino boards.
Pensa: This company uses Arduino boards to make their flagship DIWire, a rapid prototyping machine that bends metal wire to produce 2D and 3D shapes.
Infinity Aerospace: The ArduLab – powered by Atmel’s versatile ATMega 2560 microcontroller – is a highly capable experimentation platform ready for space right out of the box. Sensor mounting is straightforward, with unique functionality addressing the technical challenges of operating in space.
Additional exhibitors at the Atmel World Maker Faire booth include Fuzzbot (robots), Evil Mad Scientist and Colorado Micro Devices. We’re looking forward to seeing you at the Atmel booth, so don’t forget to follow us at @makerfaire, @atmel and @arduino!
Atmel is also slated to host a public media/industry analyst panel on Friday, September 20th, on the maker community and education. Members of the panel include Atmel’s Reza Kazerounian, Co-founder of Arduino Massimo Banzi, Atmel maker and Hexbug guru Bob Martin, university engineer professor Annmarie Thomas, EDN’s Executive Editor Suzanne Deffree, 12-year old CEO and maker Quin (Qtechknow), and MAKE Books Senior Editor Brian Jepson. The panel will be moderated by Windell H. Oskay of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.
The Ardruino Uno is an excellent lab tool for technicians and h/w engineers who have a specific design in mind. In this presentation, we will show how Atmel’s MCU apps lab uses the Uno to test harnesses for LED lighting stress testing, SBC reset response and power supply stress testing on a regular basis for the weather station prototype.
When: Sunday, September 22, 2013, 12:30PM – 1:00PM ET Where: Make: Electronics Stage
My pals just exchanged a great email thread about the computing technology NASA used to put folks on the moon back in the 1960s.
Richard King loves vacuum tubes, old computers, and high technology.
It started with Richard King, crack EE and the Altium guru over at STEM, sending out this video with a note: “At last a documentary film on the Apollo guidance computer that’s more in-depth than the usual talking heads about how ground-breaking it was and the marriages that were sacrificed to make it.”
Audio guru Steve Williams was first to respond:
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Hard to go back that far and remember what did and didn’t exist and was or was not used for any type of electronics construction, even though I was alive back then.
Let’s see, no LSI, not even sure if those cans were really multi-transistor gates or just 3 lead transistors. Spot welded, not soldered into headers in the particular configuration to make a potted logic module. Same with the hand assembled core memory modules. All plugged into a machine assisted assembled, wire wrapped “mother board” / back plane / card cage sort of housing. No pc boards in sight. Don’t know if the displays were very very early LED, (black and white film) but I think it pre-dates them as well. Punch cards and paper tape to help the assemblers control the assembly processes.
Audio guru Steve Williams hold up a Stone Poneys album with Linda Ronstadt on the cover.
Wow, seems so “stone knives and bear claws”. Some of it must have been chosen for the beyond normal mil spec construction needed for space flight. Analog consumer electronics in the same era was using cheap phenolic pc boards with all soldered connections to it’s components, and had been for 10 years, even back to the tube era.
They used Fairchild Micrologic. Basically RTL gates in a TO-99 metal can. The functionality was comparable to the more familiar 74 series. I think they avoided using PC boards due to reliability issues (especially with the cheap phenolic types), which is also why they went with welded connections instead of soldered ones. The displays were electroluminescent. Each segment had its own individual latching relay, and the DSKY had a multiplexed I/O arrangement to select and change any relay. The multiplexing was very slow, so in the video you can see the updates propagate through all the segments.
Eric Schlaepfer holds a radio he made with a 555 timer chip. When shown to Hans Camenzind, the inventor of the 555, Camenzind said: “I never expected it to do that!”
The machine itself has very interesting software. It runs a primitive multitasking OS with multiple programs running (tasks). Some tasks ran as native machine code on the machine but others used an interpreter/virtual machine. Someone’s built a replica in his basement. Someone else wrote a simulator.
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That got Richard King, the originator of the thread, to comment:
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I was particularly amazed by the “Rope memory” system. Whereas traditional R/W [read-write] core memory uses only 3 wires per core (X-address, Y-Address, R/W), rope memory adds an additional wire for each word I presume. Thus for a 128 word memory you’d thread 130 wires through the cores (adding 2 lines for addressing). To read a particular word you’d set the address to access one of its bits and then read its wire. 0’s and 1’s of any given bit were apparently encoded by either passing the wire through the core for the bit or not. You’d build the word by reading it a bit at a time. To keep the number of wires down you could string words together, making long words. The film said that the capacity of the memory block was 8K (65,536 bits) and packing 8000 wires through even one core stretches credulity.
“Stone knives and bear skins” it might have been but it was very, very clever and apparently “stone axe” reliable, a critical requirement. As for the logic, my understanding (from exactly where I can’t recall) is that all the logic gates were the same type, NOR gates. They could build any logic function including flip-flops (storage) from that.
I’m also mildly surprised that they used wire-wrap for the module interconnect in the rack. Working at Link Flight where we did 40MHz pipeline logic boards with 100’s of ICs all connected very reliably with wirewrap it wasn’t a total shock though. It was also interesting to see how much automation was put into the Apollo computer’s manufacturing, since I doubt they made more than a 100 or so computers for the entire program.
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Industrial designer and ME Dave Ruigh found a one-hour CAD simulation of Apollo 13 mashed up with the real CAPCOM communications right when the O2 tank blew up. It shows a simulated control panel and a CAD rendering of the spacecraft.
Dave notes:
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That little computer sure got a workout this day (text transcript here). Amazing, 3 guys in a spacecraft 180,000 miles from earth, going through checklists and talking to Houston. No raised voices, no confusion, no panic. As calm as Southwest 2795 talking to ATC [air traffic control] on long final to SJC San Jose airport]. Nothing like the movie, as great as it was.
Dave Ruigh installing $1500 of Kokam lithium-polymer batteries into his GO-1 carbon fiber recumbent tricycle.
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I remember seeing the Apollo 13 movie when it came out. When we came out of the theater, my girlfriend told me “You started breathing hard towards the end”. What a testament to Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, that they got me so emotionally involved when I already knew there would be a happy ending. And I do agree with Mission Control, this was their finest hour.
Eric goes on to comment, “Apparently at one time the guidance computer program was consuming 60% of US integrated circuit production!”
All this space talk fits right into what I have been working here at Atmel. We have one program with a startup aptly names Made In Space. They are launching an Atmel-powered 3D printer into orbit. There are a lot off cool things that happen when you have a zero-gravity environment to make parts.
Atmel is also involved with Infinity Aerospace and the Ardulab. The Ardulab is an Arduino-powered laboratory module meant to be launched into space. The XMEGA chip in the Arduino will automate a lot of the data collection and lab control tedium, sparing the astronauts for more useful work. Stay tuned, in a week or two I can tell you about the 9/15 launch of the Cygnus rocket to the ISS (International Space Station). There will some cool Atmel hardware on board, besides the Arduino.
Atmel Applications Engineer Dean Camera recently sat down with EEWeb to discuss Atmel-poweredArduino boards, his favorite dev tools, tricky bugs and the contents of his bookshelf.
On the subject of DIY Makers and encouraging an interest in electronics from an early age, Camera said he recommends getting involved, asking questions and experimenting ASAP.
“The Arduino platform is a great start into the world of embedded systems; it gives you known working hardware and a simple environment,” Camera explained. “However, remember to gradually tear it down and replace bits and pieces with the less ‘kid glove’ versions so you learn how it all works.”
In terms of his favorite dev tools, Camera highlighted JTAG ICE-3 and Rigol DS1052E.
“For hardware, my JTAG ICE-3 and my Rigol DS1052E. If a problem can’t be solved with one, it can probably be solved by the other. Granted I need to invest in some more specialized equipment some day (the Saleae logic analyzers was a god-send at work) but for now those are my main gotos,” said Camera. “For software, Sublime Text is my one and only editor, and Git. PEOPLE, LEARN GIT.”
And the trickiest bug Camera’s ever fixed? A USB Mass Storage Class driver.
“My problem is that I forget problems once I (eventually) solve them – but I’ve gone through my share of Heisenbugs that change based on how you observe them. Race conditions are unfortunately a huge part of my life and I’m resigned to solving them with a smile, but it’s a grim task,” he added. “I can say from experience however that debugging a USB Mass Storage Class driver using the same host Windows platform is not fun, as the default behavior of the Windows storage driver appears to be ‘bluescreen.'”
And last, but certainly not least, Camera says he’s long kept the Forest Mims book on his bookshelf, along with books from Joe that helped him make his entry into the world of embedded C.
Interested in reading more about Dean Camera? The full interview can be found on EE Web here.
Atmel’s MSL2021/23/24 series of solid state lighting (SSL) LED drivers are equipped with an adaptive power control scheme and temperature compensation circuitry – offering the most efficient power management for high color-rendering index (CRI) luminaires.
According to an Atmel engineering rep, the MSL2021/23/24 devices drive one dominant LED string and one color LED string to achieve the target correlated color temperature (CCT), replicating the color spectrum and attaining a high CRI value.
“Competitive LED drivers, by contrast, are more expensive and complex to use, requiring an external microcontroller and firmware to address temperature compensation,” the engineering rep explained.
The above-mentioned Atmel series consists of three devices:
MSL2021 – The first LED driver with integrated temperature compensation for the color LED string.
MSL2023 – Equipped with an I2C serial port and internal pulse-width modulation (PWM) generators.
MSL2024 – Features PWM inputs which are suited for development with Atmel’s general-purpose and communications AVR microcontrollers.
Key functions and features include color control of two-color LED light engines, direct control of offline AC/DC controllers, adjustable temperature compensation for controlling color over temperature, as well as PWM and peak current control of each LED string.
Additional key specs include an accurate “white point”adjustment using proprietary temperature compensation scheme; control of single or two-stage power factor correction (PFC) AC/DC or DC/DC supply via efficiency optimizer; initial calibration at factory and storage of system defaults via integrated EEPROM; smooth start-up to avoid “red flash” and comprehensive fault management.
In terms of specific applications, the MSL2021/23/24 LED drivers can be used for general lighting, architectural lighting and mood lighting. Interested in learning more about Atmel’s extensive lighting portfolio? Be sure to check out our main lighting page here which offers a detailed look at various lighting technologies.
You can do a firmware upgrade on your JTAGICE3 and it will work with the ARM M0+ based SAM D20. If you don’t want to use a separate emulator, there is also a debugger on the $39SAM D20 Xplained Pro eval board. Atmel has a long history of providing inexpensive development tools. The $49 “Butterfly” eval board and $200 STK200 in-circuit emulator (ICE) was what got me to switch to Atmel micros back in 2000. These days we have three in-circuit emulators, sometimes called debuggers. The $49Dragon is low cost and does all AVR chips, even the 32-bit AVR chips. The AVR ONE! is much more expensive, about 500 bucks, but it does have trace. That means you can go back and see where your program went as it executed. This can be worth every penny if you have complicated program flows with internal and external interrupts.
Atmel Studio 6.1 SP2 includes a firmware update for the JTAGICE3 which adds programming and debugging support for the SAM D20 devices. The JTAGICE3 firmware will be automatically updated when a programming or debugging session is started in Atmel Studio 6.1 SP2.
Atmel Studio 6 users who want to take advantage of this firmware update will have to upgrade to Atmel Studio 6.1 SP2, which will be available for download at http://www.atmel.com/tools/atmelstudio.aspx starting August 15th.
This is just too cool. Studio 6 has always supported code development of Atmel’s ARM MCU (microcontroller) chips, the ones with internal flash. Now you can debug the M0+ ARM-based SAM D20 with the same JTAGICE3 you use for AVR and AVR-32 chips.
I have to laugh when my buddies say Atmel tries to make money on our eval boards and emulators. We don’t look to make any appreciable profit on the tools. We give away Studio 6 for crying out loud, and anyone that has done product design knows what a cheap deal the eval boards and these emulators are. Atmel sells chips and touchscreens (XSense). That is where we make our money. So you folks that have bought a JTAGICE3, celebrate, you can now debug our great SAM D20 with it. Like I said, “Friends don’t let friends go without a debugger.”
Atmel’s ATxmega32E5 is a high-performance, low-power 8/16-bit AVR XMEGA microcontroller combining 32KB ISP flash memory (plus 4KB boot code section) with read-while-write capabilities, 1KB EEPROM, 4KB SRAM, 8-channel event system, a programmable multi-level interrupt controller, 26 general purpose I/O lines and one 16-bit real time counter.
“The MCU also boasts three flexible 16-bit timer/counters with compare modes and PWM, two USARTs (with SPI Master mode), one Two-Wire Interfaces (TWI) with SMBUs Level 1 support, one Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) and one 16-channel/12-bit 300kSPS A/D converter with optional differential input with programmable gain,” an Atmel engineering rep told Bits & Pieces.
“In addition, there is one two-channel 12-bit 1MSPS D/A converter, two analog comparators with window mode, a programmable watchdog timer with separate internal oscillator, accurate internal oscillators with PLL and prescaler and programmable brown-out detection.”
Meanwhile, an XMEGA Custom Logic module (XCL) consisting of two independent 8-bit timer/counters and two lookup tables used for defining glue logic rounds out the above list of features.
“Essentially, it is designed to reduce bill of material (BOM) and PCB size as the XCL can replace external circuitry such as delay elements, RS-latches, D-latches, D-flip-flowps chip-select logic, AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, NOT, MUX AND/OR/XOR logic gates,” the engineering rep continued. “Together with the USART, the XMEGA Custom Logic module can be used to enable customized communication protocols. Simply put, by executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the device achieves throughputs approaching 1 MIPS per MHz, neatly balancing power consumption and processing speed.”
To accelerate development with the ATxmega32E5 microcontroller, Atmel offers the XMEGA-E5 Xplained, a hardware-based platform that allows engineers to more easily evaluate the device. The kit offers a range of features that enable devs to quickly kick off projects with ATxmega32E5 peripherals, as they learn how to integrate the AVR device in various designs.
Aside from the ATxmega32E5 microcontroller, key XMEGA-E5 Xplained features include:
And today we will discuss an Atmel-powered sensor reference design, or more specifically, the HMT7442 IO-link transceiver and optimized IO-Link device MESCO software stack – courtesy of Atmel, HMT and MESCO Engineering.
“IO-Link is the emerging industrial communication standard to connect the control unit to sensors and actuators. The standard is backwards compatible with the commonly used binary switch signaling and introduces a bi-directional digital communication. These capabilities bring several benefits to the end user, including easier cabling, remote diagnostics and configuration,” an Atmel engineering rep told Bits & Pieces.
“For many sensor designers, the physical size constraint is the key factor for integrating the IO-Link capability. And that is why Atmel, HMT and MESCO Engineering have placed a strong focus on saving board space in our offering of the TM96.0 GENIE Explorer Variant A reference design.”
More specifically, the TM96.0-A reference design demonstrates the high integration of the Atmel, HMT and MESCO solution. It acts as an IO-Link device and is equipped with a push button, two LEDs and a potentiometer to allow developers to add stimuli to the system.
“The reference design runs the MESCO IO-Link stack on an Atmel tinyAVR88 microcontroller and communicates on the IO-Link cable using HMT’s HMT7742 PHY IC,” the engineering rep continued.
“The implementation used in the reference design does not require external protection to sustain reverse polarity or to comply to the EMC surge protection defined in the IEC 60255-5 standard. This makes the TM96.0 an ideal tool to evaluate the Atmel-HMT-Mesco solution.”
Meanwhile, the TM96.0-B Evaluation Kit enables hardware and software designers to develop, test and debug the IO-link sensor application. Basically, the TM96.0B features the IO-link transceiver HMT7742 and the Atmel ATmega328P. It is equipped with all necessary connectors for in-system programming, while supporting debug sessions using Atmel’s free AVR StudioIDE, Atmel AVR Dragon or Atmel JTAGICE-mkII. Plus, an evaluation kit is provided with pre-compiled MESCO library software, which can be linked to the main application using the WinAVR GCC compiler.
Interested in learning more about how Atmel AVR MCUs can power your industrial sensors? Be sure to check out our detailed device breakdown here.
