[chbot] Stampalike progress, microchip direct, and a toaster oven.

[Richard Jones]

Thanks for the post Chris, sounds like you are having fun.
I would be very interested in a demo of the toaster oven sometime, maybe 
you do do a demo at the robotics group? Perhaps one day we'll be 
soldering BGA chips at home? Our paths seem to be crossing, I much 
prefer smd for home assembly, saves all that drilling and cutting. 
Yesterday I bought some ATmega8 microprocessors from South Island 
components in through hole format. Thanks to Phils post about a month 
ago I've been looking at Arduino project and thought that a few boards 
similar to Arduino would make a nice robotic platform. For about $6NZ ea 
chip and programmable in 'C' thats not bad. With 8K flash and 1K RAM 
they should be sufficient for maze solving, table top challenge and 
robot sumo. The main additions to the Arduino are power supply pins on 
the port connectors to power plug in daughter boards, much shorter and 
much thicker tracks.

Richard

Chris Hellyar wrote:
> Hurro, thanks for the feedback...
>
> Andrew Errington wrote:
>   
>> 1) Keep the pads for the through-hole reset switch, and add the footprint
>> for the SMD version inside the through-hole footprint.
>>   
>>     
> That'll depend on the switch when they turn up.  I'd imagined keeping 
> the hole device count to just the connectors to keep the 'top' of the 
> PCB free for some text information, but if it works out when I get the 
> pad layout for the switch I can do that...
>   
>> 2) Add three pads for (optional) SMD resonator.
>>   
>>     
> That's not a bad idea, and I've got heaps of space due to the length of 
> the 20pin sil, will have a look at that idea.  Might make it a 
> through-hole though, as there are so many variations on SMD resonator 
> footprints it's not funny, and 3 pin resonators are common as muck.  I 
> had figured the 8Mhz internal would do 95% of what folks would want to 
> do with the '88 on a hobby project, and they could stick a resonator 
> external if they wanted..  Default config for the RS232 bootloader will 
> be to use the internal 8Mhz.
>   
>> 3) If you have 20 pins and 19 functions then how about making the 20th pin
>> "power out" from the regulator? (Maybe you did that already).
>>   
>>     
> Yeah, the pin out so far is:
> 1 - Vin
> 2 - Gnd
> 3 - Vout
> 4-19 portA & B
> 20- NC
>   
>> 4) Add pads for (optional) Dallas Econoreset or similar reset supervisor.
>>   
>>     
> Will have a look at that one...  I've not had a situation with a recent 
> spec PIC where I felt the need for the reset supervisor functionality, 
> the brownout detect seems to be pretty good 99% of the time... (The '88 
> has BOR).
>   
>> (I know that feature-creep is deadly, but you did say you have time on
>> your hands...)
>>   
>>     
> :-)  Being (Temporarily) unemployed has it's advantages..
>
> Cheers, Me.
>
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