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After playing around with the board for awhile, a few other changes that I would make

A project log for 1284P-Target

A development board for the Atmega1284P.

mcunerdmcu_nerd 08/29/2018 at 14:130 Comments

Overall, I think I didn't do a half-bad job on the board but there are a few more things that I would change in addition to a reader's suggestion of dedicated headers for I2C and SPI:

Move the crystal and its capacitors a little further away from the socket to make it easier to install a ZIF socket.  While I don't swap out chips often, the Atmega1284P holds on for dear life which means considerable force is needed to remove the chip, which makes bending a pin or two a real possibility. 

Add a jumper in series to the power LED.  When it comes to working with low-power projects and running it off of batteries,  the little bitty LED can consume quite a bit of power compared to everything else.  One could simply not solder in the LED, but this would be a more flexible solution.

Combine many of the jumper headers. Soldering in a lot of 2-pin headers is a bit time consuming and more tricky the get them straight vs using one or a few larger headers.

Possibly shrink down the board size. The fab that I used for this board (JLCPCB) quotes the same price for anything up to 10 x 10 cm, so unlike with other boards I've designed I didn't place as much emphasis on making everything compact as possible.  While it does give me quite a bit of room to easily add things on for future revisions, in it's current state it does mean it would cost considerably more to get it made at a fab that strictly charges by the square in or cm.

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