Goodmorning everyone.
Wanting to implement some projects derived from Arduino, I purchased some AtMega328 chips on the internet.
However, the received chips are not the same as the ones mounted on my Arduino board, ie an "AtMega328P-PU".
The various chips received have two different marks, namely "AtMega328P U" and "AtMega328-PU".
I found no trace of these variants of the original chip even on the AtMega328 datasheet.
What is the difference between these chips and the original one?
Are there any limitations in their programming and in their use in projects derived from Arduino?
Thanks.
Because of bootloading issues 328P-something chips are much easier to work with than 328 Psomething chips are. The spacing is really crucial in this naming convention. Stuff after the dash implies the physical ackage of the chip (dual inline packagae (DIP/DIL)) is the one you'll usually want but other versions exist for use as soldered in SMD devices. The P right afetr the 328 without any space or dash between them implies use of PicoPower technology, a feature of some chips the presence or lack of which won't usually have much practical effect on the majority of applications you'l make of the chips, but arduino's bootloader and such usually assumes it's presence by default as do a lot of example tutorials and fuse bit calculatros found online, so things are easier if you can buy the 328P-something sort of chips. "atmega328 vs atmega328p" in any search engine will reveal many discussions about these differences and how they've often confused people who had just made the step of trying to buy chips to do arduino stuff outside of the regular uno board. I encountered this confusion myself once.
Tiziano958:
Where can I found more information about that and especially on the microcontroller ATmega328?
I've never seen any official documentation of the change from Microchip. If you find some, please post a link here because I would be interested to see it.
I know the topic has been discussed here on the forum. I believe westfw had some good information on the change. With enough searching you should be able to find that thread. I only have the old Atmel chips from before the buy out.
What Mouser calls them now vs what Mouser or other sellers called them before doesn't change what they are.
The datasheets have been gone over, they don't always say quite the same as the old ones.
In 2012 using IDE 0023 I had to hack a file to change 1 byte in a chip ID to load my PU instead of PA 328 chips I got from Futurlec for $2.20 each, a bargain compared to the official chip.
The next time I bootloaded 328's was using IDE 1.06 with Nick's software and cookbook-blog and it went like a breeze, ID passed just fine. I bootloaded 1284's in the same session.
From what I understand, that's all standard now or you might have to download new core files. No biggie.