Simplicity

Software is tricky stuff. I do it for a living. Integrating lots of open source code is very tricky stuff. Nothing ever quite configures the way you exactly need it.

Circuit design and soldering is tricky stuff to. Even breadboarding gets tricky when you have to hunt down that 48 ohm resistor and mail order it. Then, half way through the delivery time you realize that you need a 22pf cap too.

I'm going to try and minimized the tricky stuff for my iRobot (turtle) hacking. Where I can buy a "module" I will (rather than code up work-a-rounds or do any major soldering).

For example, I decided to go with a simple ATmega128 board rather than the butterfly. Why? Well, the butterfly already required me to solder header pins (for UART, JTAG and ISP to start). Plus the UART has a voltage converter (14v RS232) where the turtle wants TTL level serial. I would have to hack the butterfly (either with solder: put another level converter in or through software: utilize the SPI ports for UART). Hacking the butterfly was starting to look ugly.

With the ATmega128, so far everything is about jumper cables. This is simple and clean. I should be able to just hook it up directly to the turtle.

Now, regarding software...
I want the turtle's brain (the ATmega128) to be able to take instruction from files on an SD card. I need an SD card holder that has header pins I can connect to the SPI on the ATMega128. Okay, that was simple. But... How do I interface the SD and 128? Well, I need an SD driver and a FAT file system. There are some free implementations out there (of varying quality), but the real question is whether or not I want to take the time to "port and integrate" as well as if I want to suck away a significant portion of my precious 4K RAM (on the ATmega128).

Sigh. Money to the rescue? I am looking at this. It does everything I would normally do on the ATmega128 (regarding filesystem and driver mgmt). I have to think about this. Simplicity = Money? Complexity = Time/Effort?