Mega Feather M0

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kscharf
 
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Mega Feather M0

Post by kscharf »

The Atmel SAMD20/21 family looks like a nice upgrade from the ATmega. So far most of the available Arduino like dev boards using these chips are based on either the 32 or 48 pin flavors (and they don't expose all of the pins either). With the idea in mind of porting the Marlin 3D printer firmware to the SAMD, I'd like to design my own Arduino clone based on the SAMD21J18A (the 64 pin package). I'd like to fork the design from the Feather M0 (maybe using the footprint of the Arduino Mega). I think I can modify the bootloader in the Adafruit board package, and change the "pins_arduino.h" file as required. Since the processor core is really the same I hope that that's all I'd have to modify to get the Arduino environment to work on the larger chip. The one problem I don't know what to do about would be picking a VID/PID pair to use. I guess for testing I could 'borrow' the ones used by the feather M0. Any ideas, things to look out for?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Mega Feather M0

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

If you want to distribute the board or code, you'll need to register with the USB working group and pay for a VID.

We're okay letting people use our VID for personal, one-off projects, but not for bulk use or deployment.

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kscharf
 
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Re: Mega Feather M0

Post by kscharf »

There are some places that will assign you a PID from a VID block that they own, if your project is open source. Also some companies will do the same if your project uses their parts and you only plan on distribute less than 10K of them or so. (Atmel, Microchip, etc).

If I develop this, it will be open source with both the HW and SW put up on Github with the VID:PID redacted so anyone that makes use of my design will have to figure that part out for themselves. But for testing, where the thing doesn't leave my 'lab', I would borrow the use of an existing VID:PID pair just to get it up and running.

BTW, does Adafruit ever enter into a royalty arrangement with third parties to jointly produce new products that have started out as open source 'itches' that needed to be scratched (with you getting the Lion's share of the deal)?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Mega Feather M0

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

I've heard of companies doing, that, but IIRC the USB Working Group wasn't happy with them and threatened to revoke the VINs. That's an area where you'd have to do some research.

I know we've developed some boards in collaboration with others, but don't know anything about the details. You'd need to talk to our business team about it. Send a note containing a link to this thread to [email protected] and the folks there will help you.

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kscharf
 
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Re: Mega Feather M0

Post by kscharf »

adafruit_support_mike wrote:I've heard of companies doing, that, but IIRC the USB Working Group wasn't happy with them and threatened to revoke the VIDs. That's an area where you'd have to do some research.
The USBWG changed their contract terms some years back to prohibit companies from sub-leasing VID's. However, any company that paid for a VID BEFORE those contract terms were added is 'grand fathered' in, the contact CAN'T be legally changed without consent of BOTH parties (unless there is legal language in the original contract that allows unilateral changes). IANAL, but from what I've read, those threats may be from a toothless tiger that would lose their argument in a court case. In any event, the VID's in question will NEVER be re-assigned, so the only problem in using them will be that you couldn't legally make use of the USB logo on your product. (who cares!).

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