Tag Archives: review

Atmel SAMD10 Xplained mini board review

Got a pile of dev boards for some testing. Some first impressions of the ATSAMD10-XMINI. First off, it’s nice and cheap, $9 or so. Comes in a really small cardboard box, with absolutely no documentation beyond some links on the box. Totally fine, no need for anything else these days. The board is a somewhat unusual shape, with the micro usb connector for the onboard DDBG (CMSIS-DAP) protruding out the back. Whatever. At first glace, the board appears well labelled. A closer glance….. well…

The user guide for this board refers to all the headers as JXXX. The J number is NOT in the silk on the board. The userguide has a picture of the board, and marks some of the J headers, but not all. The rest you have to just sort of figure out. This seems like a really amateur oversight. Fixing the silk would have been ideal, but at least the documentation could have a better overview of the board! (The userguide does manage to include screenshots of how to install atmel FLIP, which seems like a total waste of space for this document)

The user guide refers to the pins with J200-1, -2, -3, etc. The silk on the pad arrays is just numbered 1..5, and A..P. There’s silk on the back describing some pins, no idea why some and not others. There’s a big box of silk on the back that seems to be describing some pins, but no idea which, or what order.

There’s a specially boxed off section of pads in the top right, 2×10. It’s unlabeled. No idea what it’s for. (Update, turns out this is for Xplained Pro addons, the userguide covers this, and actually uses the grid array notation that matches the board.)

The user guide does (un)helpfully include arduino pin numbers, for the arduino compatible pin arrays, but there’s no mention of arduino software, or linked anywhere, so who cares about that. The column in the table that includes this is unlabeled as well.

The factory firmware is a morse application. Connecting to the CDC-ACM uart provided by the EDBG module lets you blink out letters, and tapping in keys on the user button prints them to the uart. It resets every few seconds idle and prints some help text. Neat enough.

The user guide does NOT include the schematic of the board. This is a serious omission. Particularly given the poor documentation/silk screen match up, but also as these boards are often used as examples for your own projects. A snippet of the power supply section is included, but again, the labels don’t match the board. I went back and forth through the user guide a few times to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. However, the software package download, which I skipped initially, actually includes no software. It includes all the schematics and proper board diagrams that should have been in the user guide. Pretty poor form Atmel :|

No comments on the tools or device itself yet, that’s for a much later date :)