Make: Poor man's Minimig ARM Controller

In the last post I presented my findings on using a cheap ARM dev board as a replacement for a MiniMig ARM Controller. I've done some fairly extensive testing and it seems to work passably, so here are some instructions on how to build your own.

Firstly you are going need a board that hosts a AT91SAM7S256 chip and exposes the GPIO in a direct manner i.e. does not have any peripherals attached etc.

Specifically you need to make sure that:

• PA4 - PA10
• PA12 - PA15
• PA24 - PA28
• PA20
• GND
• 3.3V
• nRST

Are available. If this is not the case, you could possibly alter the code to change pin mappings, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

Next you'll need to get hold of a 28 pin DIP socket, preferably the "tulip" kind:

In my case the dev board headers were available as headers with 2 rows of 10 pins:

So I used some crimp connectors and 20 way ribbon cable to connect these up.
Next you'll need to figure out the pin mappings between your dev. board and the pic socket.
To start you need the schematic for your dev board, mine had this for the pinout info:

Then this must be mapped to the relevant pins on the PIC socket. I used the ARM controller schematics as a guide:

and the PIC mapping:

This should get you to something like this:

From there its just a matter of carefully mapping pin to pin with some wire.
I stripped and tinned the relevant wires in the ribbon cable, pushed them into the mapped holes in the DIP socket and then soldered them in.

The observant reader will notice that GND, 3.3V and nRST are not mapped to the dev board header.
There is another header on my board that provides GND and 3.3V and the JTAG header exposes nRST.

And that is all there is to it :)

HTH
-(e)

Prelude: Poor man's Minimig ARM Controller

I have 2 Minimigs both fitted with the replacement ARM Controller boards.
In a recent cock-up I nearly managed to destroy one of the ARM boards by breaking a pin off whilst hastily pulling it out of the Minimig.

Thanks to a $1 DIP socket I managed to save the controller by soldering the pin back onto the board.... and gently plugging the controller into the new socket:

Which thankfully worked pretty well. During this whole debacle I happened to have a proper look at the mcu on the board and saw that it was an AT91SAM7S256. I remembered that I had a cheap dev board with the same chip on it. The dev board cost me $25 when I bought it, as opposed to the near $100 price tag of the ARM Controller, so I began to wonder if it might serve as a cheap replacement.

After some very careful pin mapping and buzzing the dev board out, I came up with this:

And it works 100% (or seems to so far). Whilst the board I used does not seem to be for sale any more, there are alternatives available and even this board ($27 on eBay as of this post) :

(the bigger brother AT91SAM7S512) should be simple enough to wire up and port the code to (if even necessary).

All in all a fairly cost effective hack that also has the benefit of providing JTAG access for devs that wish to extend the ARM Controller firmware.

-(e)