We recently bought a big pile of very cheap AVR Minimus 32 USB dev boards via Manchester Hackspace.
These ship with a DFU bootloader. This works fine when building regular C code, but that involves a fair learning curve for people new to embedded development.
To that end I implemented Arduino support for the Minimus. This is now available on github. An AVR-ISP programmer (or Arduino pretending to be one) is required to replace the bootloader, but after that ‘s just as easy to use as any other Arduino board.
We have spare Minimus boards for sale at the space. We’ll even flash the Arduino bootloader at no extra cost :-)
Great work!
I have a pile of these too.
I can’t seem to burn the bootloader and must be missing something. Did you have to set any fuses? Can you post a pic of the AVR-ISP / FTDI cable connection to Minimus.
Thanks for your work on this.
Jon
IIRC the avr-isp uses the standard 6-pin layout, which should be trivial to map onto the minimus. If you’re using an avr-isp clone or arduino-as-isp then the pinout will depend on the exact software/hardware combination you’re using.
An FTDI cable is a completely different thing, and won’t work.
I got the bootloader (atmega32u2) to load–no problem – Arduino blinking as required.
Try to program it using Arduino and get the error that ATmega32u2 not recognized.
What should I be trying?
If you’re using windows then you’ll have a very old version of the compiler which doesn’t support the atmega32u2. There’s details on upgrading on our wiki here: http://wiki.leedshackspace.org.uk/index.php/Minimus