Support for using the ATmega328p Xplained Mini board. More...

Detailed Description

Support for using the ATmega328p Xplained Mini board.

Overview

The ATmega328p MCU is most popular in the Arduino UNO. The Xplained Mini board is a reduced version of Arduino UNO with a EDBG CMSIS-DAP programmer.

The Xplained Mini has two internal oscillators, one clocked at 8MHz and one at 128kHz and one external 16/8MHz clock at 5/3.3V. The default fuses of the Xplained Mini are configured to use external 16MHz oscillator. This default configuration uses a 5.0V supply voltage.

MCU

MCU	ATmega328p
Family	AVR/ATmega
Vendor	Microchip (previously Atmel)
RAM	2KiB
Flash	32KiB
EEPROM	1KiB
Frequency	1MHz/8MHz/16MHz
Timers	3 (2x 8bit, 1x 16bit)
ADCs	6 analog input pins
UARTs	1
SPIs	1
I2Cs	1 (called TWI)
Vcc	5.0V USB (when clocked at 16MHz)
Datasheet	Official datasheet
User Manual	User Manual
Design files	Design files
AN 42552	AN_42552

Clock Frequency

The Xplained Mini has two internal oscillators clocked at 8MHz and at 128kHz that allow it to be operated without any external clock source or crystal. By default the fuses are configured to use the external 16MHz clock without clock divider resulting in a CPU clock speed of 16MHz. There is no need to clear the CKDIV8 fuse once it is already done.

default fuses: (E:FC, H:D1, L:E0)

This "board" is configured to use 16MHz as core clock, so that the ATmega328p runs at the highest frequency possible using the external clock source.

By setting the environment variable ATMEGA328P_CLOCK to a custom frequency in Hz (e.g. 1000000 for 1MHz), this core clock can be changed easily. Refer to the datasheet on how to configure the ATmega328p to use an external crystal, an external clock source or the clock divider.

Relation Between Supply Voltage, Clock Frequency and Power Consumption

A higher supply voltage results in a higher current drawn. Thus, lower power consumption can be achieved by using a lower supply voltage. However, higher clock frequencies require higher supply voltages for reliable operation.

The lowest possible supply voltage at 8 MHz is 2.7V (with some safety margin), which results in an active supply current of less than 3 mA (about 8 mW power consumption) according to the datasheet. At 1 MHz core clock a supply voltage of 1.8V is possible resulting in an active supply current of less than 0.3 mA (about 0.5 mW power consumption). For more details, refer to the official datasheet.

Flashing the Device

The only requirement is avrdude tool installed:

make BOARD=atmega328P-xplained-mini flash

Serial Terminal

The AVR Xplained Mini already have an USB CDC converter build in. So, simple type to get terminal:

make BOARD=atmega328P-xplained-mini term

On-Chip Debugging (OCD)

E.g. with the AVR Xplained Mini and AVaRICE you can debug the ATmega328P using the debugWIRE interface. Compared to the ATmega MCUs with JTAG interface the debug facilities are however significantly reduced: Only a single hardware breakpoint and no watchpoints are supported. The hardware breakpoint is used for single-stepping. If you set breakpoints, the AVR Xplained Mini will transparently replace the instruction to break upon with a break instruction. Once the breakpoint is hit, the break instruction is overwritten with the original instruction. Thus, every breakpoint hit cause two flash cycles to be performed, which not only results in a slow debugging experience, but also causes significant wear.

In order to enable debugWIRE run, replace <PROGRAMMER> with the xplainedmini_dw:

avrdude -c <PROGRAMMER> -p m328p -U hfuse:w:0x99:m

You can disable it again via:

avrdude -c <PROGRAMMER> -p m328p -U hfuse:w:0xd9:m

Warning: As the reset pin is repurposed for debugWIRE, a regular ISP will not be able to disable the debugWIRE interface anymore. The AVR Xplained Mini can temporary disable the debugWIRE interface via a debugWIRE command and avrdude will do so when debugWIRE is used.

For debugging, the ATmega328P Xplained Mini already have a debugger. Once the debugWIRE is enabled via the fuse settings, you can start debugging via:

make debug

If this fails after flashing the ATmega328P, it is like due to debugWIRE being temporary disabled by avrdude in order to use the ISP feature. Perform a cold boot and the ATmega328P will have debugWIRE enabled again.

Note: If you are using a different debugger than the AVR Xplained Mini, you have to export the AVR_DEBUGDEVICE environment variable to the required flag to pass to AVaRICE, e.g. when using the Atmel-ICE you have to export AVR_DEBUGDEVICE=--edbg. If the debug device is not connected via USB, you also need to export AVR_DEBUGINTERFACE to the correct value.

There is a how to ATWINC1500 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi Network with this board (AN_42552).

Files
file	board.h
	Board specific definitions for the standalone ATmega328p "board".

file	gpio_params.h
	Configuration of SAUL mapped GPIO pins.

file	periph_conf.h
	Peripheral MCU configuration for the ATmega328p xplained mini "board".