I developed an universal SPI driver for XMEGA line of MCU for a battery powered device, where power efficiency was important. To get anything started on new hardware I have started with a simpler code first which uses interrupts and then I began looking at using XMEGA’s DMA controller (that was totally new to me) to improve speed and make the MCU sleep longer. This is a complete driver that can work with any kind of SPI peripherals.

It is also a nice practical introduction to DMA, because XMEGA DMA controller is one of the most simple you can find in microcontrollers (comparing let’s say to Kinetis Cortex-M), yet has all the necessary features.
Continue reading “XMEGA high-performance SPI with DMA” →

Character LCD are one of the easiest and cheapest way of adding output to a microcontroller system. The world of character LCDs has mainly standarized on HD44780 controller chip, which was designed to be interfaced with the rest of the system by a parallel bus, but today simple bit-banging does the job.

One of the obstacles to using HD44780 with XMEGA are different supply voltages. Displays usually require 5V, while XMEGA is 3,3V-only. Continue reading “XMEGA and HD44780 LCD” →