Scaling up to mega, for some unknown reason

“10 square meters of heaven is worth far more than 100 square meters of hell.” 

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Not to harp on too much about microcontrollers (but we will nonetheless), it seems that although most nerdy humanoids would be content with what is available in standard packages such as the Arduino Uno or Arduino Nano, we find ourselves once again drawing perilously close to the edge of insanity and playing with some freshly arrived Atmega128a chips.

They are lovely little things, about 14x14mm - and pack an impressive array of stats, including a whopping 128Kb of Flash, 4Kb of RAM and 4Kb of EEPROM. They are also dirt cheap, arriving from 中国 in a pack of 10 for just AUD $12.39. The bummer is they are damn small and not mounted in anyway useful for programming or deploying. So the first hurdle is soldering the chip onto a custom PCB adapter.

Steady hands and comically large magnifying glasses are the key

Courtesy of the Android App Magnifier on the trusty Nokia we were able to zoom in to check the final soldering for nasty shorting bridges.

Lovely connections between pins and tracks

The next problem was the actual programming. After hours of scouring the interwebs we found that we need to use a USBasp serial programmer and then upload ONLY using the menu "Sketch" and "Upload using Programmer".

Even then there was one last barrier, and that was that the otherwise marvelous MCUdude MegaCore was not able to recognise the normal pin designation of, for instance, PB0. So using the pin number instead (in this case 8 as shown below) worked fine, and then it blinked, and all was right with the world <sigh>.

The winding way to blinky success

The Nokia is also doing a great job of capturing the hilariously fuzzy and loud bumble bees that have recently reappeared after their winter hibernation. They aren't native, but they are a welcome addition to the garden this time of year.

Large, furry and cute

The raspberry patch is also teeming with bees at the moment, and so we are anticipating a magnificent crop for the jam cupboard, if they make it past the hands and mouths of the pickers - yum yum!