Hi there,

last week I went to #Hackaday | Belgrade to meet @Mike Szczys in order to leave him the first HACK prototypes!

Before giving him the protos, I had to "hack the HACK"; that means that since I messed up big time the LDO package (mirrored footprint) I had to manually solder a bigger SOT-23 LDO using jumper wires to three locations: GND pin, VLDO pin, and VDD; to get VDD, I actually had to remove L1 and solder a wire across its pads; I tried soldering the wire to the VDD pad of the ferrite bead but I always ended up either damaging the bead pin or lifting it off from the board (because I also messed up passives footprints: 0402 footprint but 0603 components soldered on board). Luckily, the protos are fine!

Next step was modding the bootloader; I re-built the Zero bootloader to reference the ATSAMD21E18A instead of the bigger pin count G18A that the Zero uses, and I also had to change the UART port to a more convenient one and finally VID and PID codes for USB enumeration; I also made a little Windows driver for it, which references the same VID and PID codes, so that it will show as "HACK Bootloader" when in bootloader mode, and it will show "Hackaday / Michele Perla" as manufacturer, how cool is that!

Finally, I also got a modded Arduino Zero core working on the HACK; most was done in the variant.cpp, variant.h, and in the WVariant.h files, in order to correctly set pin mapping and functions to reflect the available pins on the smaller E18A mcu. Some tweaks were also made in some other files, and more have to be done in the libraries (SPI for example). BUT, at least it blinks an LED correctly, and USB Serial works fine too!

So, go get the latest version of the repository and give it a look!

Cheers,

Mick