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Arduino Firmware on the Megabitty?

gallamine's picture

Recently the user Ro-Bot-X commented on a robot, Mickey and asked if anyone know whether or not the Megabitty controller it was compatible with Arduino. For those that don't know, the Megabitty is a popular and very small microcontroller for robots, while Arduino is "... an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. " 

For all intents and puposes, Arduino is just a special bootloader that runs on Atmel AVR chips, coupled with a special compiler/libraries. Since the Megabitty also uses an Atmel AVR chip, it would seem they could be compatible. The Megabitty is running an Atmel Mega8 chip, and there are several versions of the Arduino bootloader that run on this chip. Here's a page on the arduino site that describes using the Mega 8 chip. Here's a PDF document that describes how to program and use the Megabitty.

I also found this useful (seemingly) tutorial on using the Arduino firmware on a Mega8 chip

If anyone sucessfully gets this up and running, I'd love to hear about it. I should also mention that Anton Olsen also is working on a Megabitty-sized clone already running the Arduino firmware