A little while back, Nottingham Hackspace got the opportunity to buy a bunch of Minimus V1 AVRs at a very good price. Not being one to turn down a bargain, I bought a few of these little critters to see what they can do. On paper, they look great. USB programmable micro running an Atmel chip similar to an Arduino (so possibly compatible with the Arduino IDE), in a package slightly bigger than your average USB stick but with a couple of buttons, LEDs and all the pins broken out.It turns out that there's a lot of misleading, conflicting, partial, out of date, or hard to follow info out there, not to mention that most of it is for the Minimus V2. I had the V1, so struggled to get it to do anything exiting at all for ages. After a very frustrating day of trying stuff, following dead links and generally wasting a lot of time, I got some joy with the Arduino IDE. To save you the hassle, read on for what worked for me.
If you've been reading this blog in cronological order, you'll know about the FTDI adapter I made for the Z88. If you don't read this in order, you'll know about the Minimus programming I've been doing and what the Minimus is (note that I've not blogged about that yet... be patient!) Now to turn it in to something genuinely useful...
Now to turn it in to something genuinely useful...