Hello Everyone,
There is a new MCU from Atmel ATTiny814. I cannot get any core for this MCU from the internet. Can anyone suggest how to program it from Arduino IDE.
And thanks in advance!
Hello Everyone,
There is a new MCU from Atmel ATTiny814. I cannot get any core for this MCU from the internet. Can anyone suggest how to program it from Arduino IDE.
And thanks in advance!
There is no arduino core for it.
The 814's on-chip peripherals are all totally different from the ones of existing AVRs. Although they're super sexy, it's a huge job to support it in Arduino, because you need to rewrite serial, PWM, ADC, GPIO functionality as well as standard libraries like Wire and SPI - not to mention supporting the new functionality. Everything is different, and there's also API design that needs to be sorted out because of the flexible remapping functionality that's present on the 814 (and the other two that came with it) but not in the rest of the AVRs.
Those fancy peripherals basically come at the cost of throwing away the within-product-line compatibility that makes AVRs so attractive... It looks to me like they took an AVR core and bolted PIC peripherals onto it... And the PIC peripherals are much more confusing to work with (but also considerably more powerful - though I'll note that ST Microelectronics managed to make powerful flexible peripherals that make a lot more sense than the PIC line and the t814 for their STM32 line). Also, I don't think the official core comes with a version of the compiler that supports the t814 yet, and IIRC a core that pulled in a new version of the compiler would cause some compatibility issue (I forget the details). IMHO, once you're learning new peripherals and losing the library compatibility with the rest of the AVR line, you might as well switch to a 32-bit architecture (ex, STM32, or the Teensy boards, etc).
I wonder if this is related to Microchip's acquisition of Atmel?
Almost certain it is.
Sorry to bump an old thread.
how do I get started on this Attiny814? I have got my hands on few of these chips. I want to interface a thermocouple and an SD card and I would like to use Attiny814 to store the temperature values in the SD card.
The 814 (not to be confused with the 841 which is fully supported by my core and works great) does not have an Arduino core available - it doesn't just need a third party board package, it needs all the core functions too. I am not aware of anyone having even started one.
You would need to reimplement almost all of the core arduino functions, and the essential libraries (like SPI) - all of the registers to control functionality of the hardware are different from the existing AVRs, so everything needs to be rewritten basically from scratch to provide a compatible interface. Worse still, there are some serious questions about how to handle the new functionality (particularly the pin mux) and present that to the programmer that need to be answered.
Then you'd need to create the other pieces of a third party board package. This is comparatively simple.
I don't think the version of the compiler that ships with the latest arduino avr board package supports the 814 yet either, so you'd have to deal with this, or wait until it is.
I estimate that this would take several months for an expert in AVR and custom arduino hardware packages (once this was done, adding support for the other of the new-and-shiny-but-completely-unsupported attinys would be easy), assuming they didn't have other responsibilities.
After doing all that, you could begin work on your project.
Thank you for your reply. But i meant without using Arduino as core. Like Attiny817 has a development board. Does Attiny814 have a development board to make prototypes? I am a mechanical engineer so I am not fully familiar with IC programming but does Attiny814 need an IC programmer?
Microchip doesn't produce a development board for the 814, only the 817. You can apparently use the 817 development board as a programmer for the 81x series, I think you might need to remove a couple of 0R resistors to disconnect the onboard 817 from the programmer first.