Upgrading from AVR to ARM

Other Hardware 3rd Party Boards
1

Hi!
In a recent forum post that I made, a was asking around for a small Atmel chip with much more memory.
The response I got wasn't really what I was looking for, so I did a bunch more research:
What I found was the AT-SAMC20E18A, an ARM based 32-bit microcontroller.
Since I have never used non-standard Atmel chips before (aside form the ATTiny85, which is standard enough) I have a couple of questions:

  • How can I get this in small quantities? The only website I found has a minimum of 2,000 units (~$5,000)...
  • How easy is it to program? Can I use an Arduino Uno as the ICSP?
  • Where can I get board definitions? I have the one for the Arduino Due, which uses the same style of processor, but I do not think that will work...
  • How can I adapt my sketches to work with this chip? Already I have a file-not-found error for <avr/IO.h>, but I haven't looked into it very much...
  • Is there a through-hole DIP available? I found this 32 pin surface-mount to breakout convert, but I'm trying to make this as compact as possible...

Thanks for any feedback. Any suggestions or even alternative chips (I chose this one because it has the least amount of pins and the most memory, which is the two things I need).

2

The Due uses a Cortex M3 cpu

The AT-SAMC20E18A shows M0

and while Mouser doesn't have any of those in stock right now, they do have the ATSAMC21E18A-AUT in stock

3

Are you really set on staying in a low pin count controller, even if a higher pin count controller fits in "small enough" pcb space? (Like an atmega1284)

You might want to look at the pic32, some of which have impressive amounts of memory and are still in dip28, and supported in arduino by the chipkit folk.

4

Can you say more about your size requirements? You mentioned 28pin dip.

How about a Wemos d1 mini?

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Or a maple mini?

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5

Fuzzyzilla:

  • How can I get this in small quantities? The only website I found has a minimum of 2,000 units (~$5,000)...
    [/quote]

Really, how long did you spend searching ?

I typed into Google;

'Buy ATSAMC20E18A'

And the second link was the Microchip Direct site.

They will sell you 1 or 2000 ......................

6

@srnet
I didn't spend very long because of all of the other questions I had. I didn't even know where to start on those ones!

7

Fuzzyzilla:
@srnet
I didn't spend very long because of all of the other questions I had. I didn't even know where to start on those ones!

We are all busy, but a Google search on

'Buy ATSAMC20E18A'

Took me around 10 seconds to get an answer, how long did you wait for a reply in here ?

8

Have a look at this site to get a list of inexpensive development boards where the chip used can also be bought in low quantities and are quite well supported for the Arduino build environment. The F103 gives you 64K (or 128K) flash memory & 20k SRAM and can be bough as a development board for less than $4 USD