[sdiy] REVIEW: Beat707 Arduino Drum Sequencer

[Tom Wiltshire]

On 22 May 2011, at 13:54, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:

> Yeah, but breadboards are a waste of time.  How well do you think 16MHz
> clock oscillators work with 100pF of capacitance between "tracks"?

Perfectly well, in my experience. I've built and debugged no end of PIC and dsPIC circuits on breadboards, and I usually use a 20MHz oscillator xtal with 22pF caps. So if there's a 100pF of stray capacitance, I'd expect to see some effect, but I don't.

(For example:
http://www.electricdruid.net/images/dualchannelvoice.jpg
)

>> As for the programming part, once
>> you've used an ISP programmer at full speed you won't turn back to the
>> sluggish serial bootloader ; especially with the larger capacity AVRs.
> 
> I've got an ICSP cable.  I don't use it, because it's inconvenient and
> no faster than the serial bootloader.  Why bother with it, when I can
> use the serial USB cable I'm already using to send the 32kBytes of code
> in a couple of seconds?

This would probably depend on what type of "serial" you're talking about. If you're using a bootloader over a USB connection, then fair enough - no problem. If it's a MIDI bootloader and you're dumping code down a MIDI cable, you're definitely better off with the ICSP connection - again, assuming that your programmer talks to the computer using a reasonably fast interface (e.g. USB not serial port)!

T.