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kaboard
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KaBoard

What is kaboard ?

Kaboard is a development board for Atmega8 or Atmega328 microcontrollers. It was designed for small one of projects or prototypes.

It's main features are :

  • Onboard LM1117 voltage regulator providing 5v with 800mA
  • All mcu pins broken out on pin headers
  • Vcc and GND pins near every mcu pin, usefull for supplying power to peripherials or for pullups or pulldowns
  • ft232rl serial to USB konverter
  • It is not Arduino compatible

The components on the board were selected mostly, because they are cheap and easily obtianable at my local distributor. One exception is the ft232rl. Many fellow hackers told me, that an Atmega with integrated USB would be cheaper and could be used for more then just RS232 over USB. I decided to stick with the ft232rl for 2 reasons :

  • It's easy to use a serial bootloader like optiboot, that doesn't eat up much flash, for programming. There is even the possibility to use the a pin of the ft232 to reset the mcu, so even with a crashed programm you can switch to the bootlaoder, without pressing buttons on the board.

  • Whenever I used usb so far I needed a simple way to exchange a few bytes between a mcu and a computer. Emulated RS232 is usually sufficiant for this. I've allready looked into the LUFA USB stack and I've played with usb on the stellaris launchpad. Afterall I've come to the conclusion, that an extra chip like the ft232 provides a more selfcontained and also easier to use implementation for RS232 over usb. Also I learned the hard way with my steallaris launchpad, that a usb can be a real pain in the ass when it comes to debugging it.

Where can I get a Kaboard ?

Right now I don't sell Kaboards anywhere and the bug free 1.1 version has not been produced yet. So what I can offer you is a unpopulated 1.0 board with some minor bugs. So if you got a cool project and the kaboard is just the board you need, write an email to kaboard@sebastians-site.de, explain your project and I might send you a unpopulated pcb for free.

Known Issues

You just got a unpopulated Kaboard and want to know what bugs you might encounter ? Check known_issues.md to see what issues you need to fix and how I usually fix them. Also if you think you have found a new bug write me a short mail : kaboard@sebastians-site.de

What the !/%§)"" does KaBoard mean ?

The name is actually inteded to be pun for german readers. "Kaputt" is german for broken (or as dict.leo.org told me for kaput). In the palatinate dialect this word pronouced rather "Kabutt" or even "Kabudd", which sound similar to KaBoard.

Licenses

Anything in the folder libs/smisitoto_eu/ is taken from http://smisioto.no-ip.org/elettronica/kicad/kicad-en.htm The files are made avaible under the Creative Commons license rev2.5 Attribution-ShareAlike. (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/) Also I'd like to thank Walter for his footprints and 3d models here, they've been of great help in my hobby projects.

The scale.pl script (libs/scale.pl) which was used to create the Kicadfiles for the KaBoard logo, can be found in this zip-archive:http://oshwlogo.com/logos/OSHW_logo_KiCad_scalable.zip All credits for this nice little script go to Robert Spitzenpfeil http://blog.spitzenpfeil.org/wordpress/

The original optiboot code can be found under http://optiboot.googlecode.com. It is distributed under GNU General Public License Version 2.

The anything else in the project folder, like the board layout, the schmeatics and the KaBoard logo, are published under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)