Close

Designed, and sent off to the presses.

A project log for Dual ATMega328P Computer AVR NC V1

jeremy-sayersJeremy Sayers 09/16/2014 at 23:061 Comment

The boards for the AVR NC V1 have been finished and sent out to OSHPark to get created. To start off with I'll just be displaying the typed text on to the screen. But after the initial hardware is finished, I'll be working on a custom OS called JGAMES for running home built games. Here is the render OSHPark gave me of the board:

To answer some questions that i've been asked, the biggest one, why two AVRs?

Well that one is simple actually. With this project I didn't want to focus on the video output programming and being able to still have game logic running while keeping up with a refresh rate. So I decided I would dedicate an AVR to the GPU and it will take serial commands from the CPU on what to draw. That way I'm not bounded at all for what kind of games I might be able to create for it.

The next question that some people have picked up on, why are there fan headers on the board?

The answer to that one is a lot stupider. Honestly I wanted to be able to cool it. I had toyed with the idea of putting a 40 MHz crystal with the ATMega, and based on what I've read you can do it very easily with a little bit of cooling. So the end result might use a 40 MHz crystal in which I'd want to be able to stick a 120mm fan and just cover the entire board with air.

The boards were sent out on 9/13/14 and I should be getting them around 9/25/14, so I'll post more once I have the boards.

Discussions

PointyOintment wrote 09/18/2014 at 00:45 point
Third question: What's with the weird zigzag trace going to the top (in this view) pin of J3?

  Are you sure? yes | no