Computing stuff tied to the physical world


New ATmega batch

In AVR, Hardware on May 17, 2010 at 00:01

At last, 250 new ATmega328’s came in from DigiKey:

Dsc 1419

You may not have noticed, but in these past months there has been a major shortage of ATmega328 chips – everywhere. Once that happens, people start stockpiling, driving the shortages and delays up yet further, etc.

That’s 250 chips to intitialize with a boot loader + RF12demo sketch! Kinda illustrates my need for a good ISP programmer setup, eh?

There’s a substantial amount of capital investment involved in this stuff, so I’ve been cautiously moving about while trying to keep all the essential items in stock for the shop. So far, so good, mostly. But this batch sure is welcome… one less thing to worry about.

Onwards!

  1. I have this mental image of you (and your entire family) sat round watching the TV with piles of ATmega chips around systematically putting them into Flash board equipped Jeenodes, pressing the button, waiting for the complete flash indication, over and over and over again!

    Just don’t mix up the piles of new and flashed chips ;-)

    I think what you need to a Jeebot programmer that can be loaded up with chips and left to it.

    Tankslappa 17 May 2010 at 12am

  2. Just hope they’re not slugs like SparkFun got recently: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=350

    Ian Tester 17 May 2010 at 3am

  3. @Ian – Ouch, I hope JC had gone to bed before you posted that, otherwise my mental image will have to be of him testing them all tonight whilst munching his way through all those coffee sweets!

    As for Sparkfun, I really hope they didn’t try to deal with a Chinese company whos email addresses were on the hotmail and gmail domains, but that’s what the company info seems to show. I’m rather amazed that the fakes had a lump of metal in the middle, I don’t quite understand why they bothered with that!

    @JC – I’m really looking forward to the unveiling of the Jeebot bulk programmer now! I expect it to be the bastard child of a sandwich toaster, an old CD drive and an anglepoise lamp. Don’t let me down!

    Oh, and don’t forget to give it RGB LED eyes so it looks really scary as it works away in the dark.

    tankslappa 17 May 2010 at 5am

  4. If they are duds, then DigiKey will have a problem… (but not to worry, they’re the real thing :)

    jcw 17 May 2010 at 12pm

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