ED Microprocessors are an Australian company situated in Boronia, Victoria. Over their 25-year history, JED has produced a wide range of boards for the industrial and scientific sectors. Thousands of their single board computers are in use in applications as diverse as traffic monitoring in Victoria to penguin weighing in the Antarctica.

Although relatively low in cost, this new design boasts high performance and ease-of-use that will prove adaptable to an endless variety of applications. It is based on the Atmel ATmega32 microcontroller which features an 8-bit RISC architecture that’s designed for efficient programming in high-level languages such as C and BASIC.

What’s on the board

As mentioned, an ATmega32 microcontroller forms the heart of the AVR200 design. JED has chosen the 40-pin dual-in-line packaged device rather than the 44-pin surface-mounted variant. In fact, all parts on the board are through-hole mounting, so that the board is easy to assemble.

The board’s architecture is very simple, with the majority of the micro’s four 8-bit ports available for external interfacing. A handful of more complex functions such as serial I/O and I²C are supported by dedicated hardware.

A screw terminal block at one end of the board accepts DC power (6-18V) for the on-board +5V regulator. Adjacent to this is a reset switch for the micro, while on the opposite side of the board are the serial communications connectors, comprising a D9 socket for the RS232 interface and a 10-way header for the I²C bus.

Rows of screw terminal blocks along the top and bottom edges of the board provide easy access to the microcontroller’s ports. In the standard configuration, eight lines function as analog inputs or digital inputs/outputs. A further 11 lines act as digital inputs, while nine drive power Mosfets to provide open-drain outputs. All port pins used as inputs include over-voltage protection.

If the standard configuration is not suitable for your application, then in most cases, ports can be swapped from inputs to outputs or vice versa with only minor component changes.