Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

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nwrightson

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Subject:

Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 10.05.2012 - 23:39 · #1

Hi Rolf,
I'm designing some general purpose XMega boards and I was wondering what the future holds for AVRCo and XMega? I'm trying to allow for the future

So would you share what your plans are for -
A) General AVRCo enhancements, features (All AVR Chips)
B) XMega functionality
-What USB support will they have ie will the USB emulate a serial port perhaps?
- Any specific upcoming functionality I should allow for?

Neil.

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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 13.05.2012 - 17:39 · #2

Hello Neil,

There are no plans now for general AVrco enhancements except the possibility to use cross-reference in Units like Delphi does it.

All drivers provided for standard AVRs and Megas are ported for XMegas, except TWI-Slave, TWI-Net and SPI-Slave. These will be done in the future.

There are 45 sample programs for XMegas.
And there is already the USBsmart driver described in the Standard Driver Manual. It provides an extremely small footprint for the XMega-USBs. There is also a sample program "XMega_USBsmart".

A full and rich featured XMega USB driver is completed and will be published in the near future when samples and Manuals are ready respectively updated.

Finally there will be an USB-RS232 bridge for the XMegas with USB.

And the very most important enhancement for the XMegas will be our PDI-Debug support.
This is extremely important because the XMegas can provide upto 3000 IO-registers containing
upto 8 bits per register. Worst case > 20000 bits which must be observed with each processor
clock cycle. This is impossible except you have a big mainframe for the job.
So debugging an XMega absolutely needs an in-circuit emulator. We are working on this.
A simple simulator can never do the job.

More questions?

rolf

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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 14.05.2012 - 00:16 · #3

Hi Rolf,

Thanks for the update.
No further questions except one that has popped up before: Is there any way to take advantage of Atmel's "Capacitive Touch" technology?
Anyway a DLL can be linked in? This would be a HUGE benefit to AVRCo and a lot of users.

I guess it would be to hard to reverse engineer and create an AVRCo equivalent?

Neil.

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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 14.05.2012 - 13:21 · #4

Hello Neil,

I guess you remember this discussion: topic.php?t=2309&page=fst_unre…ink;object, so the only new thing since then would be to take a look at C source of a similar project: http://sensi.org/~svo/capsensor/index.en.html

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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 14.05.2012 - 13:49 · #5

Hi Avra,
Yes I do remember the discussion and was hoping for a bit of progress in this area. The link looks interesting but my C is lacking.
I'm thinking a XMega would be great for this style of thing. It would be good if this could run as a Process in the background.
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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 14.05.2012 - 20:24 · #6

Hello Neil,
sorry, a Qtouch driver is not planned. It needs a scanner in the x-MHz area which loads every CPU very hard and there is little room for the rest of the application. Of course a small AVR (Mega8) can do this job but only as a keyboard controller/slave. But then it is cheaper and much easier to use a Qtouch chip from Atmel. So for me it makes no sense to implement such a driver, sorry.

btw.
A Qtouch controller chip costs US$1..2 per pcs.

rolf

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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 15.12.2013 - 14:36 · #7

Quote by nwrightson

I'm thinking a XMega would be great for this style of thing. It would be good if this could run as a Process in the background.

Hello Neil and Rolf,

I bumped into this old message searching the forum for some other things and I couldn't resist replying. Who knows, maybe it's not too late...

With resistor big enough and SysTick fast enough, capacitive sensor implementation should be doable with a little experimentation in OnSysTick as a background process using 2x n pins for n touch channels (n+1 is also possible but it would need a little calibration since it depends on the number of inputs). Principle would be based on simple RC circuit. In one SysTick we put 1 on output pin, and in each later SysTick we check for 1 on input pin(s) and act accordingly (store this info). If we have reached a number of SysTicks where input pins should definitely be 1 (finger/body is close or touching our button(s) through some casing), then we check our stored data and before resetting it we use it to change channel semaphore(s) which can be used in the rest of our application. We then put 0 to our output pin, and wait a certain number of SysTicks, then we go all over again.

How simple this principle is can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhspPkxOMxs

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Re: Whats coming for AVRCo and XMega's ?

· Posted: 16.12.2013 - 16:05 · #8

Hello Avra,

scanning such a capacitive touch button must be done in high speed because:
t = RxC -> 1Mx100pF -> 100usec for an input raise.
But one must use an oversampling of 10 to get reliable results.
So the scanning must be repeated every 10usec.
Not a heavy duty job ??? :aerger:
I always suggest to use a Touch controller or a TINY AVR with 1..4 keys
and 1..4 digital outputs to the main CPU.

rolf

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