That’s correct. Besides more memory I found that the 1634 was far better suited for OTSM than the 841, low power operations are much better.
Not me, not any more. I thought that more would be interested in moving over to 16kb MCUs because I was reading about interest in the 1616 and 1617 about the time I started using the 1634. That was quite some time ago, but to my knowledge nothing happened.
I’m quite happy with the 1634. Believe or not I’ve actually made a driver that uses every single IO on it, but what has my interest is the three pin UDPI programming. That might very well get me on to the 1616 or 3217. I’m some what reserved though, the reason why I went with the 1634 is because it’s 4x4mm with 20 pins. The pin density is high enough, I’ve had some issues with amount of solder paste on them but I seem to have got it dialed now. The 1616 has 20 pins crammed in on 3x3mm, and the 1617/3217 have 24 pins crammed in on 4x4mm. I can’t say I’m looking forward to building drivers with them… I’ve looked for 4x4mm QFN 20 pin options with at least 16kb and UDPI but didn’t find anything. I won’t move over to anything less than 16kb regardless of other benefits so my own options are limited, but gchart’s work with UDPI is something I’m following with great interest.
I always thought it was the cost of programming equipment and that held back use of the updi mcu’s, its not the first time I’ve been wrong.
I just soldered the pogo pins on a six pin Harley Quinn programming key. Even with the vias to locate the pins I need a little magnification to line things up. It’s 100 times nicer than using a Ponoma clip. Gchart’s little three pin key would be even better. Would love to figure out a way to attach one to a dial indicator stand.
I’m not sure how gchart is soldering his mcu’s without a hot plate or hot air station, that can’t be easy. I have most of the parts for a GXB172 driver so I’ll be finding out how hard soldering qfn packages is pretty soon. It looks like trying to toothpick the solder in place will be a disaster. I’m hoping thinning down some solder paste with some liquid flux and smearing it around will work OK. Bought a couple spare MCU’s to practice with, trashing boost converters will get expensive.
Do you think putting some vias near the center of the chip to give excess solder a place to go would help?
I’ve been using a hot plate. Not perfect, but better than just using an iron. I just ordered my first stencils, hopefully those will make these QFN chips easier.
Changing pins for PWM, Switch, and adding ALT PWM should all be doable in the tk-attiny.h file except for PWM output also needs to be enabled for specific pins at the top of int main(): set TCA0.SINGLE.CTRLB to enable the correct compare channel(s). You might need to reference the 402 datasheet to map the waveform/compare out to pin assignments (the 412 datasheet is missing some of these details).
I’ve been using stencils for a long time. I got sick of pasting by hand real fast. If I decided to work overtime the same amount of time I save with stencils, the stencils would pay for themselves multiple times over.
Well… at this point, I’ve ported RampingIOS to run on the Series-1 chips (ATtiny412 / 416 / 817 / etc). That was pretty easy as almost everything was pretty self-contained. And I’ve created a couple drivers from scratch using that setup with good luck.
But now it’s time to try and tackle to larger, but more popular options… Andúril/FSM and NarsilM, here we come! I dunno exactly when I’ll get around to porting the code, but I made a development board for the ATtiny816 (or 1616 / 3216). Basically the same at the 817 except it’s 20 pin instead of 24; I don’t plan on need 24 pins anytime soon. Instead of running through regulators or FETs, I’m just using the MCU output to run the LED (limited with resistors). Since this is just for testing, I don’t need it to be bright… actually, bright is bad because I’d just be blinding myself.
I’ll chime in with a small update… I’ve been working a little with getting all functionality I need running on the 3217 for a specific project. I just got the last piece of the puzzle working, OTSM.
With a 100uF cap measuring off time in 0.125 second intervals with BOD fully enabled at 1.8V threshold I got about 11 seconds with the 1634. With this new 3217 I get about 35 seconds with the same setup. Then I tested using BOD in sampled mode and got just over a minute. In sampled mode it might even be reasonable to test OTSM with a 10uF cap.
Sometimes I like reading datasheets for fun and to see what unexplored features are out there. I've been using Timer Counter A every time I needed PWM, but these new 1-Series chips have multiple timers including one called Timer Counter D which is described as such in the datasheet:
The Timer/Counter type D (TCD) is a high performance waveform controller that consists
of an asynchronous counter, a prescaler, compare logic, capture logic, and control logic.
The purpose of the TCD is to control power applications like LED, motor control,
H-bridge and power converters. The TCD contains a counter that can run on a clock which
is asynchronous from the system clock.
In essence, this allows us to use a different clock for the system than what is being used for PWM. Without the TCD, to get high resolution PWM at a high frequency, you'd need to run the system clock at a high speed (like 20 MHz), but that can consume a non-trivial amount of power (10 mA) especially if you want to drive an LED at low power for a long time. By separating the system clock and the one used by PWM, we can use the Ultra-Low Power (ULP) 32 kHz clock for the system while using the 20 MHz clock for PWM only. This can save a decent amount of power (consumption < 1 mA). To prove this out, I used Atmel's ATtiny817 Xplained Mini dev board and set it up for current measurement (removing a single 0-Ohm resistor and forcing current to pass through my DMM as explained in the Xplained Mini User Guide). The DMM used in this test is my Aneng AN8008.
The code for the PWM current tests can be found here. After conducting the current tests, I tested out the TCD functionality for driving the Xplained's on-board LED. That code can be found here.
Note: default 1-Series main clock is 3.33 MHz (20 MHz oscillator with prescaler divisor of 6)
Agreed. I never saw the need for it before. But if you want high frequency and reduced consumption, it looks like a good option. I’m going to try and airwire a couple of my ’412 based drivers to get a real driver running with it.