AVR Freaks

Hehe, nothing like throwing daylight on the sneaky tricks, to have them quietly dropped ... :)

• MPLAB Snap

Interesting dongle, based on SAM E70 also. Only about $15....

What I'm not clear about is how can they do avr SPI programming with only two pins and reset.... 

The presentation video says it has an 8 pin connector.

Yes, $15 is cheap indeed, I suppose it's their way of nudging people away from AS7 to MPLab. It seems to be working, since I feel an urge to buy one, but not now... maybe next time Microchip has a free shipping offer.

I don't think so, there are some ticket vending machines here that sometimes get exposed to near total sunlight. The background is dark blue (colour LCD), and very difficult to read.

Hmm, thanks - that's for MPLAB PICkit 4 pinout, and it's not clear if that's 2 headers, or all on one ? ( VTG is pin 2 on both tables )

I was assuming(hoping?) you could run Debug and any mix of i2c/UART/SPI, but maybe it's Debug and one of  i2c/UART/SPI, or is it even Debug on one dongle, and another is needed per i2c/UART/SPI ?

Is there a SCH anywhere, that says what J2 does ?

The pdf  just says pins 7 & 8 are NC ?

Addit:

Does anyone have a MPLAB Snap they can check the CDC Baud rates on ?  Curious to know what baud values it can accept/generate ?

Testing it out. Tried to import a basic Atmel Studio project and got this:

It says at the bottom it's not used... Okay... What do you want from me? Went with the default.

Project was imported. Build fails with linker errors.

No "find all references". Syntax highlighting barely works. No auto-completion or suggestions. No dark mode. Looks like something out of the 1990s. Built on Java.

What a load of crap.

Thanks El Tangas, that made it much better. No need to burn my retina out now. Syntax highlighting seems much better too.

The linker settings were imported but are broken somehow:

I ended up doing it manually because I can't find any documentation on the format of these strings.

It now compiles and even works. One other issue I found is that it defaults to stupidly long path names, so for example the output file here is "<project dir>/joystick.X/dist/Release/production/joystick.X.production.hex". This might cause path length problems on Windows.

I tried importing another project but it gets stuck because there are pre-build events and nothing happens when you click "finish" in the "import project" window. I tried deleting the pre-build stuff in Atmel Studio but MPLAB still failed... I guess there is an empty XML string or something that is confusing it.

Unfortunately the editor is terrible. Code browsing and completion features are extremely basic. With the old MPLAB 8 it was so bad that we used to do most of the editing in Visual Studio and just compile with MPLAB. MPLAB X looks like it will be the same, which is very annoying because it's much better if you have debugging in the primary editor. I know it's beta so can forgive the import issues, but the editor has been crap for years with no sign of improvement.

The one with the linker settings is here: https://github.com/kuro68k/Super...

I can't share the other I'm afraid as it belongs to the company. Basically it has some pre and post compilation commands to take a bootloader.o file and link it in to the main application firmware, creating a combined image:

Pre:

"$(DevEnvDir)\shellUtils\touch" "$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\version.c"
"$(ToolchainDir)\avr-objcopy.exe" -I ihex -O binary "$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bootloader\Bootloader.hex" bootloader.bin
"$(ToolchainDir)\avr-objcopy.exe" --rename-section .data=.boot,contents,alloc,load,readonly,data -I binary -B avr:106 -O elf32-avr bootloader.bin bootloader.o

Post:

"$(ToolchainDir)\avr-size.exe" -C --mcu=atxmega128a3u MicroPhocus.elf

Thanks for looking at this.

The problem I have is that I can't close the import window. It gets to here:

And clicking on "Finish" does nothing. I get the same error message about the pre build event action that you do, but can't proceed. If I click anything else like the close button or cancel the project doesn't load.

Could you share the .cproj file ?

Thanks... Maybe they can convert spaced to underscores in the importer.

I'll try it and see if it builds.

The ATmega4809 Curiosity Nano board (DM320115) is available today for $10.00. 

You must get these announcements early.

I don't see a "buy" link on that page, and I don't see the board in the microchipdirect store, either.

I wonder how Arduino feels about being undersold by their chip provider :-(