Friday, August 7, 2009

Wise4Sure - now featuring ATmega644

Last night I was able to finish the prototype of Wise4Sure. The board has ATmega644 as its core, as well as an SD card socket plus the additional circuitry (voltage divider resistors, 3V3 regulator), an RTC with DS1307 and backup battery, and a connector for the 16x32 LED display from Sure Electronics (hence its name).


Amazingly, after the few modifications, required by ATmega644, of the SDuFAT and Wire libraries, it worked from the first try.

Following are photos of the assembled and partially encased Wise4Sure project. It contains the LED display attached to the plexiglass panel, and the Wise4Sure board plugged in the back of the display. Power is provided through either FTDI or USB connector.




The 4KB RAM of ATmega644 should allow for more complex applications, including IR control, wireless (XBee) communication, networking (Ethernet), X10, wave playing etc. Really looking forward to the expanded capabilities. (With ATmega328, I was barely able to combine reading from the SD card with outputting on the LED display.)

Next step would be the design of a proper PCB.

Posted by FlorinC at 10:44 AM
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2 comments:

  1. BroHoganAugust 8, 2009 at 11:05 AM

    Very nice! It's evolving into a great platform.
    Do you think reading from the SD card is faster or slower than from EEPROM?

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  2. FlorinCAugust 8, 2009 at 6:39 PM

    Thank you.
    I did not think which one is faster, since for my purpose speed is not important.
    But this is an interesting thing to investigate (and write another post about it).

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