Memos From the Cube

Interesting week, last. I received in the mail a nice package from Donald Delmar Davis containing two of his “DorkBoard” and three “Benito” boards. The former is a very nice looking “bare bones” MEGA168 board for rapid firmware development, belonging to the “Adurino” movement which has been getting a lot of press and popularity these last few months. I’m actually quite thrilled by Adurinos, as it is *very* nice to see an AVR based design being placed into the hands of potential engineers and hobbyists rather than overpriced, underpowered, PIC based BASIC stamps. Bleah.

The board is an unusual blue color, which I rather like – it’s a nice change from the standard copper-on-green PCB that is the norm. After I manage to get a hold of some surface mount discretes, I’ll be making them up to play with.

The Benito boards are what really capture my attention however. While I’ve been reading up on Donald’s project over on his blog (including the posts about using it for its original purpose of an Adurino board programmer as well as recently a USB to Serial dongle and a USB to SPI/ISP programmer) I never really appreciated one critical aspect of the design, how damn small it is. Seriously, these things are only a tad smaller than Smiley Micros’ aptly-named USB Thingy (itself about the size of a thumbnail), which is a FTDI based USB to Serial converter, yet are incredibly flexible due to being AVR rather than proprietary chip design based.

I’m currently looking for a cheap source of three AT90USB162 surface mount ICs so I can get the boards up and running, since purchasing them from places such as Digikey are very expensive for only a handful of parts. If you have two or three of these lying around and are willing to sell for the right price, please contact me via email or leave a comment.

I’ve only done one surface mount board in my life, so the Benitos scare me. However, the best way to practice is to do it and do it repeatedly, so these should be a learning experience in more ways than one.

I’ll post photos of the boards when I can figure out how to get the camera set up for macro shots when I get home tonight. For now, check out the Dorkbot PDX site for photos of the boards, or (even better) buy some yourself.

MyUSB now has a seperate bug tracker set up, for reporting MyUSB bugs and feature enhancement requests. This is to complement the general project support and discussion group I set up last week. Please use the tracker as much as possible, so I don’t miss or forget your requests and bug reports!

As always, I’m certain I’m forgetting some piece of recent and exciting news. Stay tuned for more when I inevitably remember what it was.