Does the Arduino IDE support the ATMega48A?

Other Hardware 3rd Party Boards
1

I discovered the existence of the ATMega48A today. I'm used to working with the ATMega328P on a dev board but I'd like to play around with a standalone microcontroller on a breadboard, not on a DEV board. The ATMega328P is about twice the price of the ATMega48A. Does the IDE support the ATMega48A? I don't see it listed in the boards, unless it is included with another model?

2

Yes, the excellent MiniCore provides support for this microcontroller. You can find more information and installation instructions here:

3

Also consider the difference in performance:

ATmega48A
4 KB ISP Flash memory, 256B EEPROM, 512B SRAM

ATmega328P
32 KB ISP Flash memory, 1024B EEPROM, 2 KB SRAM

4

Thanks. I installed the boards from that link into rc3 of the new IDE but I don't see the 48A. Perhaps they only work with the original IDE.

Thanks, I realize the 48 has lower specs, but that might work in my favour for some projects.

5

This is an advanced platform that supports almost any possible configuration of these chips. This is a different approach than the more beginner friendly taken of the official Arduino boards platforms where you select Tools > Board > Arduino Uno and you get the exact configuration of the Uno and if you happen to want to replace the ATmega328P with an ATmega328, you're out of luck.

Rather than having a mile long boards list for every possible combination of the configurations, MiniCore takes the more sensible approach of providing a custom menu for each configuration parameter provided for a given chip. So you select the base chip model number from the Tools > Board > MiniCore menu, and then select the correct options for the rest of your configuration from the other menus.

In the case of the ATmega48A, you would first select Tools > Board > MiniCore > ATmega48 and then Tools > Variant > 48 / 48A.

Make sure to check the other configuration options as well. They are all documented here:

Sometimes it is enjoyable to use a chip that provides just barely the resources needed for a project, and then see how much can be accomplished within those constraints.

In this case, it is often useful to have a similar chip with more memory on hand in case you run into a situation where the temporary debugging code (e.g., Serial.print) would make your program no longer fit.

6

Thanks in0. I really don't remember seeing the ATMega48 in the board menu but I'll double check.

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