[chbot] Small Micros with I2C bus

[Charles Manning]

On Friday 22 April 2011 03:08:37 Paul Davey wrote:
> I have a group project at university involving microcontrollers.  We
> will be using an Atmel AT91SAM7S256 micro.  The project involves
> interfacing several external components.  I thought it may be a good
> time to experiment with I2C and offload some of the sensing and input
> to a few smaller micros and have the main one query them over I2C for
> the results.  Since the project we are doing is a simplified model of
> part of a home automation system it would make sense that not all of
> the sensors are a reasonable distance from the main micro.
>
> Now that I have rambled on, to the point!  Does anyone know where I
> could get a small volume of small micros (like the ATTiny series or
> such) that preferably have I2C peripherals in them.  Where do people
> buy micros from in New Zealand :/
>
> Sorry for the rambling.
>
> Paul Davey

Paul...

Send me an address and I'll send you some ATMega48s no cost. I have a couple 
of tubes of them.

The AVR slave code I've found out there is pretty poor. I had to stuff around 
quite a bit to get it working properly.

A while ago I built some AVR/I2C sensors as expansion sensors for the 
Mindstoms (which uses the same AT91SAM7S256 micro).

The code for the AVR I2C and other is at 
https://github.com/cdhmanning/avrprojects

sample Lejos code to drive this is at: 
https://github.com/cdhmanning/lejosprojects


If you're doing robotics with the AT91SAM7S256 you might be interested in 
Lejos. This provides a Java robotics platform on the SAM7S256 and is used by 
Stanford and others.


-- Charles