I made a quick little break out board for the XMEGA64 D4. For those who have been avoiding SMD, give it a try, it's really no harder than soldering iron and through hole; this board took me about 15-20 minutes equally split between through hole and SMD parts.

Looks good Eric, do you have some special applications in mind for those?

Rick,

I don't have any special application for these particular boards, I plan on using them as a generic dev board like the one you have for the ATMega. However, the project on which I spend most of time, a self balancing, Drive By Wire motorcycle, currently is using 4 ATMegas, 3 of which are critical to operation. I can reduce this to 2 Xmegas (one D3 and one D4), which will execute the code faster and reduce chip to chip comms, and a single non-critical ATmega for display, run my board at 3.3v (saving me some LL shifts with gyros), and I'll still have left over pins and capacity for additional features. With this in mind I wanted to acquaint myself with the Xmega, and having a known good circuit with a dev board and LCD display helps in that regard.

I'll add the same comment IRT Xmegas as with SMD, it looks a little hard on the front end, but it's really not that bad; the portability of code between different Xmega chips is outstanding and some of the other additional features of the chip beyond those on the Atmega make it worth getting over the initial learning curve.

Following your advice, I got my PCB designs fabricated by ITEAD, and they sell in sets of 10. This means I've got 10 of these Xmega D4 boards and I'll only use half of them. If any of the old timers/contributors on the board want a copy to play with, let me know via email and I'll mail out my spares first come first serve.

Eric

Well Eric you know I want 1.

rhulslander gmail

Ralph

Count me in too, rick at my blog site rs-micro.com.

Got a paypal, I'll send you some cash to cover costs.

Rick

Eric,

How did the board service work out for you? I've been pleased with the boards I've gotten from them.

Rick,

ITEAD been great. Not a single issue with many sets of boards, unlike with Batch PCB where I had the occasional broken trace. I usually don't need 10 copies, but their prices are low enough, especially for 5x5 cm, that it's still the cheapest route.

Eric

Eric Wow your setup is great. I did some boards but nothing near as good & neat as yours. I really enjoy & learn a lot from yours & others projects & posts. Thanks for sharing. Jim