JY-MCU with Arduino IDE

There are some challenges to program the JY-MCU Minimum AVR System Board (ATMEGA32) using the Arduino 1.0 IDE:

1. It is not a recognized board option, so ports are not mapped correctly.
2. It is not one of the Arduino chips, it is an ATmega32L, so not sure everything will work properly.
3. It comes with HID bootloader, so the IDE is unable to download the sketch with avrdude.

To my luck, Arduino IDE is able to work with custom boards: http://code.google.com/p/arduino/wiki/Platforms

This allows me to define the JY-MCU as another board and specify all the available pins and their features.

The board schematic can be found here: JY-MCU Min32 v1.2.pdf

And the files I have created to add it to the Arduino IDE can be found here: JY-MCU.zip

All you need to do is to extract the JY-MCY folder and put it into in the hardware sub-folder of your sketchbook folder (this is the Arduino folder in your Documents on a Windows operating system).

Now I can select the board in the Arduino IDE:

Here is the list of digital and analog pin allocations:

Digital | Analog | Port | Hardware & Functions

--------+--------+------+----------------------------------

 D 0    |        | PD0  | RXD  USB(D+)

 D 1    |        | PD1  | TXD

 D 2    |        | PD2  |      USB(D-)

 D 3    |        | PD3  | 

 D 4    |        | PD4  | SW1  PWM

 D 5    |        | PD5  | SW2  PWM

 D 6    |        | PD6  | SW3

 D 7    |        | PD7  | SW4  PWM

 D 8    |        | PB0  | LED8

 D 9    |        | PB1  | LED7

 D 10   |        | PB2  | LED6

 D 11   |        | PB3  | LED5

 D 12   |        | PB4  | LED4 SPI(SS)

 D 13   |        | PB5  | LED3 SPI(MOSI)

 D 14   |        | PB6  | LED2 SPI(MISO)

 D 15   |        | PB7  | LED1 SPI(SCK)

 D 16   |        | PC0  |      I2C(SCL)

 D 17   |        | PC1  |      I2C(SDA)

 D 18   |        | PC2  | 

 D 19   |        | PC3  | 

 D 20   |        | PC4  | 

 D 21   |        | PC5  | 

 D 22   |        | PC6  | 

 D 23   |        | PC7  | 

 D 24   |  A 0   | PA0  | 

 D 25   |  A 1   | PA1  | 

 D 26   |  A 2   | PA2  | 

 D 27   |  A 3   | PA3  | 

 D 28   |  A 4   | PA4  | 

 D 29   |  A 5   | PA5  | 

 D 30   |  A 6   | PA6  | 

 D 31   |  A 7   | PA7  | 

Notice that due to the differences between the ATmega328 on the Arduino boards and the ATmega32 on the JY-MCU board, not all libraries are supported. For example, the SoftwareSerial library use pin change interrupts that are not available in the ATmega32, so the library will not work.

Now I can build some code (for instance, the Blink example), but I can't program the board (upload the *.hex) directly from the IDE.

The JY-MCU board comes with an HID bootloader and this bootloader is not supported by the AVRDUDE tool that the Arduino IDE is using.

For now, I just build my code (use the Verify / Compile menu option / button) and use HDIBootFlash to upload the *.hex file to the board. After the build the *.hex file can be found in the temp files directory (on Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp).

I hope that in future versions of Arduino it will support custom tools for uploading code to the board and I can integrate some HID bootloader tool.

Another option is to put a different bootloader on the board, one that is supported by AVRDUDE, like USBaspLoader, but for this I need a programmer hardware that I don't have at the moment.

Now to my next task: make a web server using ENC28J60 Ethernet Module.

Update (27/01/2012): I wrote a small VBS script to make it easier to upload the *.hex file to the board.
The script finds the latest *.hex file in my temp directory (this is the result of verifying the sketch in Arduino IDE), prompt to continue and then use HIDBootFlash.exe to upload it to the board.
You can get the script here: UploadHex.vbs (rename the file to UploadHex.vbs).
You need to edit the following line with the location of your HIDBootFlash.exe:
shell.ShellExecute "C:\Dev\arduino-1.0.3\HIDBootFlash.exe", " -r " & hex.Path