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Friday, September 14, 2012

New hardware from a friend in need

Exciting news today for those of you interested in using something other than the Teensy for your Sish board, we've now got another option, the Minimus AVR board.

How did this come about? It's an interesting story. Seems one of my readers from the UK was very interested in trying out a Sish board of his own, however it was very difficult to get a Teensy in the UK for a reasonable price (having ordered Raspberry Pi's from the UK I understand the frustration).

Simply put he asked if the Minimus AVR board would be a suitable replacement. Seeing as it was another ATMEL chip I figured it would work fine, but would have to make a few adjustments to get a good build working.

Unbelievably he offered to send me two test boards (one backup just in case of emergency) in exchange for building a functional hex file for the Minimus. He packed up the devices and shipped them to me Royal Air Mail and we waited...a very long time! Almost a month later the postman dropped off two shiny Minimus AVR units and it was time for me to hold up my end of the bargin.

So I set to work this evening getting the code adjusted and tested. In the end it took a few tweaks and updates, but here's a link to the Wiring Diagram for a minimus Sish board, as well as the hex file for the minimus-sish (see the side panel).

Thanks again for sharing those boards with me, I really appreciate it.

Lastly, before I forget, the ATMEL/Minimus needs a FLIP program to install the hex file.

http://www.atmel.com/tools/FLIP.aspx -> Download the first FLIP program from the list of options, you will need the Java Runtime if you don't already have it installed.

Follow the instructions in this PDF to install a hex file and put the Minimus in "programming" mode.

http://www.minimususb.com/minimus_v14.pdf

Lastly, your computer (if it's Windows 7) most likely won't have the drivers for the device, so you'll want to install these drivers following the instructions in the prior pdf.

http://www.minimususb.com/files/minimus_x64_drivers.rar

If you have a different board you'd like to see about getting a Sish built for let me know, perhaps we can work the same deal again!

-hz

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