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Getting up and running with the iLabs Mini

Materials needed

Parts

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:

  • Mini board
  • Atmel programmer (usually made by hand – either a parallel port cable spliced to connect 4 wires to the board, or a serial port cable, similarly spliced, but serial requires a few 5V zener diodes and resistors as level converters)
  • FT232R chip, ATMega48 chip, LTC1660 chip
  • USB connector, header connectors
  • Passives: SMT inductor (for FT232R), some 470 ohm SMT resistors, a 10k SMT resistor, some 0 ohm (jumper) resistors, some SMT 0.1uf capacitors, a 10nf capacitor. All resistors are in 1206 packages, and all capacitors in 0805 packages. Optionally, 33pf SMT capacitors and a crystal. Optionally, 4.7uf (or other) bypass capacitors for cleaner power supplies.

Required tools:

  • Temperature-controlled soldering iron
  • Fine tip for iron
  • Sponge for cleaning iron tip
  • Solder wick for cleaning up errors
  • Something to cut header connectors with (e.g. band saw, Dremel tool, or depending on header, wire clippers)
  • AVR Programming Cable

Also useful:

  • Magnifier for inspecting your work (good one is an Optivisor)
  • Big tip for soldering through-hole parts (goes faster, and fine tips are easy to damage when doing big work)
  • Big solder for soldering through-hole parts (goes faster)

Step 1: Solder board

Solder SMT chips. Solder SMT passives. If you want to use a 6MHz clock, you can omit J1, J2, C3, C4, and the crystal. If you want to use your own clock, you can omit J3. You may also omit C10 and C6, which are additional power supply bypass capacitors. If you want to use your own analog 5V power supply (for cleaner power than the 5V from the computer), you should omit J5, and possibly, J4. Finally, solder the through-hole parts.

If you do not know how to solder properly (most college-trained engineers do not), Weller has an excellent document on the topic available as a free PDF.

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avrdude -c dasa -p m48 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -U lfuse:w:0xE0:m

To use an external clock chip, the fuses will be set differently depending on speed, but generally, they will be CKSEL3..1 is 011 (for fast crystal), CKSEL0 is 1 (for conservative crystal), and SUT is 11, giving fuse settings of (the below is untested – it is from extrapolated from the sometimes buggy spec sheet):

avrdude -c dasa -p m48 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -U lfuse:w:0xF7:m

NOTE: Be very careful programming the fuse bits. If you program the fuse bits incorrectly, your Mini will turn into a brick.

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