Teensy 2.0 alternatives, ATmega32U4

[Soarer]

Oh wow... that looks very nice for all kinds of things!

[matt3o]

Hasu, this is absolutely great! I totally love it. Especially the D-/+ pins and the screw holes. You are my own personal superhero

Are they already in production? Because I take 100

[philpirj]

Arduino Pro Micro - 5V/16MHz
Dimensions: 1.3x0.7"

Features:
ATMega 32U4 running at 5V/16MHz

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11098

$19.99


Thoughts?

[matt3o]

Arduino Pro Micro - 5V/16MHz
Dimensions: 1.3x0.7"
Thoughts?

very nice but at first sight it doesn't seem to have enough pins

[Soarer]

'Enough' is relative to the project at hand, I guess!

Comparing it to the Teensy, it's USPs appear to be the micro USB connector, and a voltage regulator so it can work from up to 12V. It's 0.1" longer than the Teensy 2.0. But there are more than a few complaints about the soldering of the connector. It could be a good choice if you want to remove the connector and wire direct to a cable or panel mount socket, since it looks fairly easy to desolder compared to a mini USB connector.

[hasu]

Looks nice and I like its beautiful layout of components.
But two complains:
1. No reset button on the board.
2. Arduino firmware is not usable from my experience of Leonardo. We'll need to replace it with LUFA firmware.

[hasu]

I got PCB today the result is not bad for my first attempt. I set one up as ADB conveter first.

It is not easy to hand solder these densely layouted small components, I'll look into reflow method with hot plate or oven.

One little charm, dual USB

[matt3o]

oh wow you are soldering them by yourself. you are too hardcore for me

great job anyway, keep us posted!

[llovro]

Guys! I need help picking a controller for my project (http://deskthority.net/workshop-f7/mobapadll-t5994.html). I would like it to have mounting holes so I can mount it on a plate. So if anyone has some suggestions please post them here.

[hasu]

This has mouting hole. I think this also will work. Its bootloader seems to be LUFA CDC which is different from Atmel stock and Teensy one. Not Bad at all.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/296

[jeff]

One more teensy alternative project on kikstarter : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/188 ... atchboxarm. It comes from UK.

[bueller]

This has mouting hole. I think this also will work. Its bootloader seems to be LUFA CDC which is different from Atmel stock and Teensy one. Not Bad at all.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/296

I've got an eBay knock off of this and it's pretty good from what I can tell. Only thing to be aware of is some of the eBay ones come shipped with an Arduino bootloader, I didn't realise and had to reprogram mine through ISP.

I'm actually using a Mattairtech board with the ATmega32U4, bit bigger than other boards but it has all pins on the AVR broken out to headers which is why I'm using it. Going to try and source one of the nice Amphenol USB connectors and wire it directly to the controller on my next build.

[BCG]

Looks nice and I like its beautiful layout of components.
But two complains:
1. No reset button on the board.
2. Arduino firmware is not usable from my experience of Leonardo. We'll need to replace it with LUFA firmware.

Hi guys, this is my first post here... hope I'm doing this right.

Anyhow I tried out the Leonardo Pro Micro for Soarer's Converter and it seems to work fine... BTW thanks Soarer, your invention rocks!!!

I didn't use SparkFun's board but rather ordered a clone from China via eBay... I got 5 for $42 delivered to the US so it was significantly cheaper.

As far as I can tell here are the relevant pins for Soarer's Converter (I didn't record all of them because it was taking forever and I'm kind of lazy; I'm sure if you care you can just check the schematic from SparkFun):

pins on Leonardo Pro Micro for Soarer's converter

soarers_converter_pro_micro.png (387.29 KiB) Viewed 30681 times

For an enclosure I used one of these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-to-PS-2-PS2 ... 5d3d4cb70c

As an adapter the thing was total garbage but with a hobby knife and a little persuasion it was able to fit the Pro Micro quite nicely. It is just the right width for a Teensy as well. Added bonus that it has 2 PS/2 connectors and a USB male included as well. Double bonus was that the PCB inside had a legend for the colored wires, making it a breeze to figure out which wire needed to be connected to which terminal.

Came together nicely, in my opinion at least:

Converter after soldering, before enclosing

soldered_to_ps2_medium.jpg (352.66 KiB) Viewed 30681 times

Completed Soarer's Converter

completed_converter_medium.jpg (362.35 KiB) Viewed 30681 times

Next time I might try to remove the micro USB as soarer suggested and replace it with the USB connection from the garbage adapter to make it look nicer and eliminate the need for a separate USB cable. In any case, this costs about $10 to make which is pretty cheap IMO.

Thanks guys for all of your great posts and contributions!!

[Muirium]

Effective!

Did the official PJRC Teensy loader app work with this board or is it not a direct clone?

[BCG]

Effective!

Did the official PJRC Teensy loader app work with this board or is it not a direct clone?

I didn't try the Teensy loader, I just assumed it wouldn't work. When I plugged the board into my XP machine it wasn't recognized; I updated the driver per the instructions from SparkFun and it was recognized as a Arduino Leonardo.

I appears however when you hook up the USB connection the board is recognized as "Arduino Leonardo Bootloader" for a few seconds... if you run avrdude before it switches to "Arduino Leonardo" it can load your firmware. There was a note on SparkFun's website about a modified bootloader and how you can trigger this functionality with a "double tap" on the reset pin... I would have to do a bit of experimentation to figure it out exactly though. Also I'm not sure if the clone has exactly the same bootloader or if it uses the standard one. For now just resconnecting the device and being quick on the draw with avrdude seems to work ok

[philpirj]

Any luck with Pro Micro anyone?

[Halvar]

urbancamo found a different way to upload the converter hex file using some software called Arduino Builder:

I've just built a particularly ugly converter for one of these terminal keyboards! All about style, me. However, on the plus side I did manage to use a Pro Micro Leonardo compatible microcontroller board, available for £2.11 direct from Hong Kong via eBay (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Pro-Micro ... 5d408c1fe6) - I have remapped the keys, where possible, to be as close to a standard model M as possible, here is the map for reference:

remapblock
ESC NUM_LOCK
NUM_LOCK PAD_SLASH
SCROLL_LOCK PAD_ASTERIX
PAD_PLUS PAD_ENTER
PAD_ASTERIX PAD_MINUS
PAD_MINUS COMMA
F23 PRINTSCREEN
F24 SCROLL_LOCK
F13 ESC
endblock

It took me a while to find a piece of software that would download Soarer's HEX file to this device - in the end I found that Arduino Builder (http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=151774.0) setup to write to a Leonardo device did the trick. The board itself is programmable direct from the Arduino IDE/Sketchpad without issue, but because of the shuffling of COM devices required programming a HEX file was a case of finding a piece of software that would do this forced shuffling. Arduino Builder does the trick...

http://deskthority.net/post135750.html#p135750

I also have two of these on their way to me and will report. This seems to be a cheap China clone of the Sparfun one (which is open hardware).

[philpirj]

ATmega328 device with 32K of Flash and 2K of RAM memory.
USB-UART on board for easy communication and programming.
Board is preprogrammed with an open source bootloader from AVRdude which is the same one used in Arduino.

http://www.mikroe.com/mini/at/


$18.00

[Findecanor]

The Teensy 2.0 is still smaller, has lots more pins, has 1/2K more RAM, can be mounted more flat, has the USB controller integrated, has the bootloader already programmed, has better documentation and is cheaper. ($16)
It does not have a crystal or power regulator, though, but such accuracy is not needed for a keyboard.

[Soarer]

And the main disadvantage - the '328 doesn't have hardware USB support

Most firmware projects (converters, controllers, etc) are using Teensy 2.0 as a base (or the Teensy++ 2.0, which has more of everything). hasu's code supports V-USB so could support the '328, but, (I'd assume) it's not the main line of development. bpiphany loves the '32U2 and its small footprint, but that comes at a cost in capabilities too, even though it does have hardware USB.

[Findecanor]

Oh, the MINI-AT's USB chip is not even a universal USB controller. It is a converter between USB and other serial protocols such as RS232. It is hardwired to talk the serial-over-USB protocol and nothing else. The USB chip is useless for keyboards.

[jesse]

I've been really happy with the Arduino Micro: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardMicro (Not the Pro Micro)
The Micro has a '32U4 and is quite easy to work with. (https://github.com/obra/KeyboardioFirmware is the firmware I've been building for it using the arduino toolset)

[solarnz]

I have also had a good experience with the Arduino Micro. It has the exact same pins as the Arduino Leonardo.
The inclusion of a reset pin is nice - I have a dedicated key on my keyboard for rebooting the chip back to the bootloader. This makes flashing new firmware easy, as I don't have to unplug the device and plug it back in to get to the bootloader.

However the Arduino Micro does not contain as many input pins as compared to the Teensy 2.0 (20 for the Arduino Micro, 25 for the Teensy 2.0)

I have tried to stay away from the Teensy 2.0 for a few months now, due to the proprietary bootloader that it comes with. However the smaller footprint and the 5 extra pins have finally won me over.

[Greystoke]

Not trying to derail the thread, but what are people using for full-size keyboard projects? I managed to get enough connections for a hand-wired Televideo terminal keyboard, but 6 rows/19 columns took some creative wiring to work with a Teensy 2.0. Should I be looking into a Teensy++ 2.0?

[Soarer]

I have tried to stay away from the Teensy 2.0 for a few months now, due to the proprietary bootloader that it comes with.

You can easily load a different bootloader (i.e. one of the LUFA ones) if you have another Micro or Teensy available (to use as a programmer)

Not trying to derail the thread, but what are people using for full-size keyboard projects? I managed to get enough connections for a hand-wired Televideo terminal keyboard, but 6 rows/19 columns took some creative wiring to work with a Teensy 2.0. Should I be looking into a Teensy++ 2.0?

That's what people have used before, who needed the pins. There aren't many (any?) alternatives (using the AT90USB1286 chip) that I know of. The Teensy 3.0 / 3.1 has enough pins, but the extras are brought out to surface mount pads underneath (plus of course the CPU difference means fewer firmwares available ready-to-run).

[ماء]

Arduino more famous in my country than teensy....
i found this,which one I choose Arduino pro mini without usb, so micro or nano?
https://www.bukalapak.com/p/komputer/ha ... -pro-micro
https://www.bukalapak.com/p/komputer/ha ... -nano-v-30
https://www.bukalapak.com/p/komputer/ha ... o-pro-mini
http://www.kaskus.co.id/thread/5218818f ... ject-board

Thanks

[Soarer]

Pro Micro - it's the only one there with 'real' USB.

[ماء]

Pro Micro - it's the only one there with 'real' USB.

My plan, i have 7 colms 5 rows handwiring,what is enough? and still cable for 2 halves

Spoiler:

schematicmatrixsymlboardii.png (109.8 KiB) Viewed 29918 times

Pro micro, no press button?press button important?
i intersted nano also really similar teensy,the usb is mini usb? like usb poker?
which most recommended? sorry many asking

[Muirium]

A Teensy 2 should be quite enough to handle all that. Share the rows across both hands of your keyboard to make a single unified 5 x 14 matrix. Easily enough.

The Teensy 2 is indeed mini USB, just like most USB keyboards. Jdcarpe has a group buy running now for them. International postage looks pretty good if you want a few:

http://deskthority.net/marketplace-f11/ ... t7159.html

I'm ordering some myself. There are other ways to make custom keyboards, but I find the Teensy is the easiest of them all. Everyone's code and all the tutorials cover Teensies, and they're not all that expensive compared to all the other parts you need.

[ماء]

I see in GH Nanos not recommended...
maybe, i will buy teensy from jdcapre or choose Pro micro

Thanks