SparkFun A La Carte Custom Board Designer

SparkFun Electronics is offering a web based custom board design service called SparkFun A La Carte (ALC).  You can choose from a few different microcontrollers that can run Arduino programs.  You also have a choice of I/O, connectors and power options.  Communications options include RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth.  There is a one-time design fee for each board and a per unit cost calculated as you add the components.  You can get a 50% discount on the design fee until 12/31/2020 with the promocode ALCSPARKFUN50. For more information see this ALC post on the SparkFun Blog  

This YouTube video on the custom board designer goes over an example design.

WIZnet IoT iOffload Contest

WIZnet is running a contest this summer for IoT designs that use either the W6100 Internet controller chip or WIZ610io Ethernet  module.  They are looking for 'IoT innovation' and will award five $1000 and ten $500 prizes.  For more details see the IoT iOffload Contest.

WIZnet products include chips and modules to enable networking for microcontrollers.  For example, the Arduino Ethernet Shield 2 uses the W5500 Ethernet Controller.

Atmel-ICE and Development Board Sale at Microchipdirect.com

The Atmel-ICE Full Kit is half off with coupon code TP1747 until February 28, 2018.  A few other development boards are discounted as well.  See details at http://www.microchipdirect.com/product/DevToolDeals

I have used the Atmel-ICE with a few different AVR microcontrollers along with the Atmel Studio 7.  It works well but I have had a few small issues with JTAG debugging from Atmel Studio, usually I just restart the debug session and things work.  Definitely the best tool I have found for AVR JTAG debugging. For more information see the the Atmel-ICE product page.  The link to the online user's guide on that page is currently broken, I will add it to the comments if I can find a link.  Here is the Atmel-ICE User Guide at DigiKey.  The Youtube video Atmel Edge With Paul Rako: Debug 102 shows and unboxing and goes over the basics of the kit.  The video is embedded below (no pun intended).

Atmel AVR Hero Consumer Electronic Design Contest

The Are You an AVR Hero? Contest kicked off at Maker Faire a few weeks ago.  Maker Faire is over, but you can still enter you design until December 31, 2013.  This is a Facebook contest and half of the judging criteria is public votes, so you want to enter early.  The other criteria are quality of the idea, quality of the device design, and commercial potential. Here is a link to the official rules.  Click here to vote on a design and click here to enter.

At the time of writing, the design with the most votes (83) is an LED Matrix Tic-tac-toe game using an AVR ATtiny85 on a solderless breadboard.

New Low Cost Lattice FPGA Kits

For $19 you can buy a high performance or low power iCE40 family evaluation kit with free iCEcube2 development tool support.

The iCEblink40-HX1K Evaluation Kit is the high-performance platform with a iCE40HX1K FPGA.  The board is USB powered and programmable.  An onboard Atmel 90USB162 8-bit microcontroller allows two-way communication with the FPGA.

The iCEblink40-LP1K Evaluation Kit is contains a low-power and small footprint iCE40LP1K FPGA.  It also contains the Atmel 90USB162 for communication.

Both iCEblink40 kits feature 1280 tables, on-chip RAM, 1Mbit SPI flash and capacitive buttons.  The low price lasts until October 31, 2012.

Lattice is also reducing the price of the MachXO2 Pico Development Kit to $29 until the end of the year.  This kit allows you to test popular serial interfaces using the LatticeMico8 open, free 8-bit soft microcontroller, it also features a segmented LCD, 4 capacitive buttons, SPI Flash, I2C temperature sensor and power measurement.