¶ Potato Shield

The MeshPotato, developed for the VillageTelco project, contains an Atmel AVR ATmega8L microcontroller that converts RS232 UART samples to TDM bus samples and implements a FIFO buffer between the two ports. This code lives in svn.

After attending linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, and seeing the huge amount of interest in the AVR based Arduino platform, as well as modding routers, David and I decided to pursue the idea of creating a Potato Shield - exposing the AVR microcontroller I/O pins via the standard Arduino shield pattern.

The AVR serial port is tied to the Atheros AR2317 wifi system on chip's UART, so a method of flashing via the AR2317 would be required - perhaps a script sitting on the AR2317 that talks to another script on the user's PC. This has the benefit of being transparent to the user, allowing the standard Arduino IDE to be used. Alternatively, we could use a web based flasher, as the MP already contains a web server.

The AR2317 contains some GPIOs that are not used by the current MP design. These should be broken out on headers for hackers to use.