MegaOS - ATxmega development board
Couple of years ago when XMega microcontrollers came out, me and couple of my friends thought that it would be fun to make a PC style board out of it. We had programmed AtMega series and knew that it could be fast enough for many of the PC peripherals. So I routed the MegaOS board. I had it manufactured and because none had time to program, it just sat in the box. Now I bought all the necessary components, soldered it together and tested a bit. It passed the smoke test and the programmer could program the chip. Fine enough for me – back to “no time & motivation” box.
- 5.5mm jack for regulated 5V DC input at maximum of 800mA. This is used for powering external peripherals and as well as the board. Low dropout voltage regulator makes 3.3V for AVR.
- ATxmega16A4 chip as its hearth. External 16MHz crystal that with internal PLL would run the chip at 32MHz – faster than most of early personal computers.
- SD card socket for storing your applications and data.
- 3.5mm jacks are connected to 6 of the 1 MSPS analog to digital converter channels for audio, simple oscilloscopes or data logging. Two of those channels can also work as 1 MSPS digital to analog converter.
ATxmega16a4 board from bottom
- VGA port. Its control lines attached to I2C and color lines connected to 8 bit resistor ladder DAC.
- 2x PS/2 ports so you could control your programs with keyboard and mouse, using hardware UART.
- Standard ISP header for programming.
- For debugging – a extra UART header and a LED.
So did You tried any VGA resolution tests?
No, I abandoned the project after first hardware. But there have been several similar VGA tests with even slower MCUs (like atmega88)