Just a quick one…. for some time until I discovered the ESP8266 and the Espressif SDK which I use today, I was an Arduino fan and one of the more annoying aspects was the lack of support for all but the mainstream units – Atmega328, 2560 etc.  One particularly nice chip was the 1284, in particular because it was the ONLY one of the larger Atmel chips of that class which was available in 40-pin DIL format.  Sadly I would always find myself altering libraries to handle this chip.  I use to get samples regularly from Atmel (SMT) and Aidan and I had our own board made which we still use today.

Sometime, I don’t remember when, I discovered a series of articles which helped me make good use of the 1284 and 1284p – a fellow by the nickname of ManicBug. Here’s a link and you can find out more about the chip there. He developed core which would work with the Arduino IDE – but after a while as things moved on we ended up with much easier ways to add whole classes of chips to the IDE…. well yesterday I found a repository which does just that for the 1284 chip – and indeed others and so I thought I’d take the opportunity to send the link to you.  Dead easy to add to the Arduino environment following the instructions – but there’s more – have a look at the other repository that HANS has put together.

So apart from lots of pins – what’s nice about this Arduino-code-compatible chip? Arduino has 2k RAM, 1284 has 16k – but it gets better – FLASh=128k, EEPROM 4K, 2 UARTS, 3 Interrupts, 8 analog pins.. Worth a lot but it is more expensive than the 328-based boards.

Hope that is useful. Here’s a neat Atmega 2560 board I found  - hell of a lot smaller than the standard Meg board…