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.
