Introducing
FíloM8

Why Fílo?

The low cost and flexibility of Atmel’s AVR microcontrollers has enabled a wide array of development platforms, from the ever-popular Arduino to a multitude of others—with a dizzying variety of features in every imaginable shape and size.

We’re big fans of Arduino and other platforms, and they’re great places to learn and explore. But once you start building larger projects, all the connectors, shields, and support circuitry can quickly get in your way. You want access to all the pins, and you don’t feel like patching a hobbyist board into your project with a rats’ nest of wiring.

Break free.

We designed Fílo to make this transition easy. It’s a minimalist platform designed for solderless breadboard prototyping, just a bit longer and no wider than the microcontroller chip itself. Fílo gives you direct access to every pin, unencumbered by peripherals and other circuitry you don’t need, while retaining the essential passive components necessary for clock, programming, and reset, in a way that doesn’t interfere with your design.

Fílo makes it possible to plug an AVR microcontroller directly into your solderless breadboard and begin programming and designing immediately. When you’re done with software design, your solderless breadboard is already wired to accept the bare microcontroller chip if you desire.

For those already familiar with Arduino, Fílo offers an easy and elegant transition to solderless breadboard design. Full access to every pin, without the need for a rats nest of jumper wires or support circuitry, makes prototyping new projects fast and painless. You can even continue to develop in the familiar Arduino IDE. Just plug in Fílo and go!

Features

• Standard 6-pin, Arduino-compatible ICSP header
• Exact same physical and electrical pinout as the “bare chip”
• 3-pin clock source socket (accepts either a crystal or ceramic oscillator), with 20 pF load capacitors
• Decoupling capacitors for both analog and digital power supply pins
• Reset button with 20k pull-up
• Power LED
• High-reliability machined sockets
• Machined pins, which extend the same length as the pins on a standard DIP IC

Program it your way.

Fílo can be quickly programmed in-circuit, on your solderless breadboard, or directly attached to (and powered by) the programmer alone. Fílo features a standard 6-pin ICSP header for use with popular programmers such as the inexpensive and ubiquitous USBasp. Since the “bare chip” is directly exposed, you can use any megaAVR toolchain that supports your target MCU. Because ICSP programming doesn’t rely on a bootloader, additional code space is gained, programming is faster, and boot delay is eliminated.

When loaded with an ATmega328P chip, Fílo M8 becomes compatible with the Arduino Uno, and can be programmed directly from the Arduino IDE using a supported ICSP programmer. For even greater Arduino compatibility, you can plug Fílo directly into an Uno board and program it the “Arduino” way, using a burned-in bootloader.