This card is distributed by Sparkfun Electronics. It contains an Atmel 168, USB support circuitry, breakout pins, and a socket for an XBee module.

This seems like the perfect card for me. It has onboard processing with plenty of RAM/Flash and an XBee module for robust Zigbee communications.

Hardware

Seems to be excellent. Contains some power regulation and a reasonable processor as well as a nice interface to the XBee module.

Software

Mix of good and unusable. See the postscript below, but…

As delivered from sparkfun there is one primary problem. This is an Arduino card. As such it has a huge software infrastructure required to support it and the firmware drivers for the funnel are just awful. For example it is hardcoded to communicate at COM3 and any other port produces random error messages (board not found).

The Arduino documentation is moderately good but the funnel more than makes up for it by having essentially no doc at all. To program the firmware you must communicate with the board via RF (or use JTAG). The supplied USB connector only provides power, no communication. And the firmware is downloaded as a Processing file (a meta-language like C++). The doc claims you can’t download to version 2 boards, so this isn’t that useful for me.

Documentation

Arduino doc is extensive, the funnel board doc is nonexistent.

Support

Some Arduino support although the people on the forum work with other boards. No direct funnel support.

Summary

Gosh I wish I could figure out how to program this reliably. Not recommended.

Overall the hardware is almost perfect and the software is a zero.

I’m still tempted to try to get this puppy going.

Postscript

Take a look at my post on wireless bootloading the funnel. It’s completely usable now that I’ve updated the firmware using a JTAG programmer. I can trivially send a hex file to it and program in whatever I want.

Now, what to use this for…