The *uino-1284p assembled

The *uino-32u4 went together flawless. For initial testing I used the Arduino Leonardo bootloader and core files. Since my pinout differs from the Arduino Leonardo this required some translating of digital pins to get the lights to blink. But blink they do. I am so glad to see this actually working. Loading the Leonardo bootloader onto the board using the Arduino 1.0 IDE was trivial and worked without a flaw.

The *uino-1284p went together with minor issues. On the hardware side I noticed that the polarity of the reverse polarity protection diode is marked wrong. To be exact, the schematic is correct, the schematic symbol is in the proper orientation. However, I did add a little “plus” sign to the circuit board to where the anode should be. I erroneously placed the little “plus” by the cathode. When it tried to place the reset tact switch on the board it would not fit. I don’t know if there is a “standard” tact switch, but i picked a different footprint for the switch on the *uino-1284p. I had to make something work by shoehorning a through hole switch into submission. It works and I will have to see what Digi-Key part is appropriate for this purpose.

I was a little concerned about loading the firmware onto the ATmega8U2. It isn’t done via the Arduino IDE and I have yet to find a standalone method to use the AVR ISP MKII on the Mac. Fortunately the Arduino IDE includes everything needed to program with the AVR ISP MKII. While the avrdude executable is not in the default path, it is easily accessed by specifying the full path. Also, the avrdude command line required to get the ATmega8U4 code loaded is well documented in the Arduino distribution. This is the command line I used:

cd /Applications/Arduino 1.0.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/arduino/firmwares
../../tools/avr/bin/avrdude -C ../../tools/avr/etc/avrdude.conf \
    -p at90usb82 -F -P usb -c avrispmkii -U flash:w:UNO-dfu_and_usbserial_combined.hex \
    -U lfuse:w:0xFF:m -U hfuse:w:0xD9:m -U efuse:w:0xF4:m -U lock:w:0x0F:m

I used the Mighty 1284P Platform Files to load the bootloader onto the ATmega1284P chip and to build the blinky sketch. I also had to translate from the Mighty 1284P pinout to the *uino-1284p pinout in order to get lights to blink. But all went flawless and now I have blinky lights.

What’s next?

• Create pins_arduino.h for each board to reflect the proper pinout
• Create the hardware support files and documentation for each board
• Create a shield to put each board through its paces to verify digital I/O, analog inputs and PWM outputs.

If you have some spare ATmega8U2, ATmega1284P, or ATmega32U4 itching to be put to use, and are willing to experiment with an unproven board, I am now comfortable making blank boards available.

The *uino-1284p assembled

The *uino-32u4 assembled

The quest: The list of extensions associated with an application are defined in the info.plist file in the applications package. At first I thought the easy way would have been to add the .ino and .pde file extensions to the info.plist file of the MacVim application. Just add it to the same “CFBundleTypeExtensions” container as other like file extensions. I did this by adding .ino and .pde extensions wherever .cpp was referenced. But this accomplished nothing. Searching on Google I discovered that one must reset the Launch Services Database using the “lsregister” utility. Even that did not cause MacVim to be visible in the “Open With” menu for .pde and .ino files. I then looked at how .ino was defined in the Arduino apps info.plist file. I noticed some very significant differences between the statements for MacVim and Arduino. Looking up terms such a “LSItemContentTypes” and “CFBundleTypeMIMETypes” in Google I discovered that there are different methods by which filetypes are registered with the system. I came across this post in a Google search result for “LSItemContentTypes”. Convinced I did it wrong, I restored my modified info.plist for MacVim to virgin condition.

The solution: I copied the “CFBundleTypeExtensions” container for the .ino extension from the info.plist file of the Arduino application. I then modified it for .ino and .pde and nothing else.

		<dict>
			<key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
			<array>
				<string>ino</string>
				<string>pde</string>
			</array>
			<key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>
			<string>pde.icns</string>
			<key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
			<string>Arduino Source File</string>
			<key>CFBundleTypeMIMETypes</key>
			<array>
				<string>text/plain</string>
			</array>
			<key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
			<array>
				<string>TEXT</string>
			</array>
			<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
			<string>Editor</string>
		</dict>

I opened the info.plist file for the MacVim application and inserted the above code right below:

  	<key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
	<array>

Upon saving the file I then reset the Launch Services Database.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r

Voila! We have MacVim as a preferred application in the “Open With” menu…

Just one last note, this has all been done on OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.8.

The *uino-1284p v0.3 PCB Top

The ATmega1284P provides 128k of FLASH and 16k of RAM. It has 10 more I/O pins then the ATmega328P. The additional I/O pins are brought out to a 5×2 header in a non-standard Arduino position. All other I/O headers are in the locations one would expect from an Arduino compatible form factor. The design features a dedicated ATmega8U2 for USB connectivity. The circuit has been taken from the Arduino UNO but the TQFP-32 package was chosen for easy solderability. Power supply input for the board is selected via a jumper. Power supply options are USB bus powered or unregulated DC input. An onboard LDO regulator will accept an unregulated input voltage between 6.4V and 15V.

The source files for this project are on Github.

A note on the licensing of the hardware design, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, CC BY-SA. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

Please refer to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ for the license.

The *uino-32u4 Circuit Board Order

I have already written about the ATmega32U4 based *uino-32u4 I’ve created. Today I received the circuit board order. The order was placed with Seeed Studio’s Fusion PCB Service on December 24, 2011 and arrived at my door on January 13, 2012. I am impressed, at the speedy service and the quality of the boards. So far this has been an all round awesome exerperience!

Unfortunately I do not have any ATmega32U4-AU on hand. Soldering things to the board, getting it fired up and programming it will have to wait a little while longer. But I am excited and happy for this to have become a real physical thing, not just a figment of my imagination.

And just in case anyone wonders, I should have used a better camera to take these pictures. There are some significant distortions present caused by the camera. The boards are true and square.

The *uino-32u4 Circuit Board Top

The *uino-32u4 Circuit Board Bottom

*uino-32u4

While this is really easy to do in the permalinks settings in WordPress, it still left me with a site of essentially stale links. Anyone that linked to my site prior to day will get 404 errors. That is certainly not desirable. To deal with the issue, here comes mod_rewrite to the rescue. I added the following rewrite rules to the .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Allow short URL using /post/%post-id%
#RewriteRule ^post/([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?p=$1 [L]

# Rewite legacy /%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/ to new format
RewriteRule ^[0-9]+/[0-9]+/[0-9]+/([^/]+)/? post/$1/ [R=301,L]

# Rewrite legacy /category/%category-name%/ to new format
RewriteRule ^category/([^/]+)/? topic/$1/ [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

I purposely did not add these statements to the existing WordPress permalinks rewrite block. WordPress is kind enough to only alter the portions of .htaccess that it created. It will not alter any statements outside of the # BEGIN WordPress and # END WordPress block.

I also tested a rewrite rule that allows accessing posts by their numeric post ID. I am not sure what I could do with it just yet. Maybe a link to be able to copy really short URL to emails and forum posts? I don’t know, but it works…

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js#pubid=[your addthis id]"></script>

To have the AddIt buttons show in the post footers of the homepage and multi post pages navigate to the Appearance > Atahualpa Theme Options > Edit POST/PAGE INFO ITEMS area and add the AddIt buttons to the FOOTER: Homepage and FOOTER: Multi Post Pages boxes.

<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style " style="float: right;">
<a class="addthis_button_facebook" addthis:url="%permalink%"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_twitter" addthis:url="%permalink%"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_linkedin" addthis:url="%permalink%"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_compact" addthis:url="%permalink%"></a>
</div>

My desire was to have larger and more functional buttons on the single post pages. Unfortunately this requires altering the index.php file of the Atahualpa theme. Rather then place the AddIt code directly into the php file I choose to create a widget area between the post content and the post footer. This is the patch for the Atahualpa themes index.php:

--- index.php.orig	2012-01-13 00:55:37.000000000 -0600
+++ index.php	2012-01-13 00:55:49.000000000 -0600
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@
 		<?php bfa_post_byline('<div class="post-byline">','</div>'); ?>
 		<?php bfa_post_bodycopy('<div class="post-bodycopy clearfix">','</div>'); ?>
 		<?php bfa_post_pagination('<p class="post-pagination"><strong>'.__('Pages:','atahualpa').'</strong>','</p>'); ?>
+		<?php if (is_single()) bfa_widget_area('name=Single Post Socialize'); ?>
 		<?php bfa_post_footer('<div class="post-footer">','</div>'); ?>
 		</div><!-- / Post -->

This will result in a widget becoming available in the Appearance > Widgets configuration section. Place a new widget in the Single Post Socialize widget are and populate it with AddIt buttons:

<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style addthis_32x32_style" style="padding-bottom: 10px !important;">
<a class="addthis_button_facebook"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_twitter"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_preferred_1"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_compact"></a>
<a class="addthis_counter addthis_bubble_style"></a>
</div>
<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style ">
<a class="addthis_button_facebook_like" fb:like:layout="button_count"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_google_plusone" g:plusone:size="medium"></a>
</div>

The results of all of this you can examine right on this site….

I was faced with the daunting task of a search and replace mission. I wanted to replace all <code> tage with <pre> tags and all </code> tage with </pre> tags. Not all that fond of mundane slave labor I figured out how to run some sql command on the WordPress tables. I strongly recommend backing up ones database before manually manipulating the WordPress database. It doesn’t take much of a typo to really mess up the content. In fact, I tried all of it on test installation just to be sure all will work well.

Here are the two statements that did the trick for me, it did the search and replace quite swiftly.

update wp_posts set post_content = replace (post_content,'<code>','<pre>');
update wp_posts set post_content = replace (post_content,'</code>','</pre>');

The search and replace workhorse in this method is “sed”, the Unix stream editor. I created the following shell script “sed.sh” in the root directory of the HTML content:

sed '/<\/HEAD/ i\
        <!-- Inserted_before_closing_head_tag -->
        ' $1 > tmp.txt
cat tmp.txt > $1

In order to apply these changes to each and every HTML file the following “find” command was executed:

find . -name '*.html' -exec sh sed.sh {} \;

And “voilà”, all HTML files in the web directory now have a shiny new line with a HTML comment. A final step is to cleanup the temporary files created:

rm sed.sh tmp.txt

On a side note, PeeWeeLinux is pretty outdated and has not seen any development in a long long time. However, I do still want to keep the web site and files alive, even if just for historic purposes. Not so long ago I have used Embedded Debian for a Compact Flash based system. It works quite well.

The first component placed was the FTDI chip. It was soldered using the drag and wick method using my old rosin core solder. Since placing these I have received some new tips for my trusty Weller WTCP. I also acquired some no clean flux and solder. I am hoping to eliminate the wick when soldering SMD. The remainder of the SMD components were easily placed using the magnifier I received for Christmas. I can place 0805 components without magnifier but having the light and magnifications is much less strain on the eyes. The magnifier lamp also helps to place components accurately and nicely lined up. I choose to power the board strictly via USB. Therefore none of the regulator parts or power switching parts were populated. Just a small wire to permanently connect VUSB to VCC was needed to always power via USB.

I used the AVRISP mkII to burn the bootloader into the ATmega168 and ATmega328. I thought performing this function via the Arduino environment would be easy. The first attempt with the ATmega168 went flawless. However, when I went to program the ATmega328 some errors were printed and the programming aborted. After some digging around the Arduino Forum I discovered that the Arduino Duemilanove used the ATmega328P, not the ATmega328. When attempting to program the chip I had reported a device ID that differed from what was expected. Fortunately I found the instruction to modify the Arduino environment to allow using the ATmega328. Unfortunately I did not make any notes on the process.

I do not like having bare boards laying around. Especially not once an Arduino has some shields stacked on it. The quest for an enclosure began. It didn’t take long and I realized that these board could fit nicely into small Lock’n'Lock containers. They are in plenty supply in the Walmart food storage container isle. The plastic is very easily drilled or cut. Perfect to keep these boards safe from children and pets.