Atmel AVR1934 User guide

AVR1934: XMEGA-A3BU Xplained Software

User Guide

Features

• LCD with backlight

• Sensors readout

- Light sensor

- Temperature sensor

• Menu system

• QTouch button demonstration

• Date and time functionality using Real Time Counter

- Time since production

- Current time and date

1 Introduction

The Atmel® AVR® XMEGA®-A3BU Xplained evaluation kit demo software is created
to showcase the XMEGA-A3BU, touch button and LCD, using a simple menu
navigation system, and small applications showcasing different features. For
detailed documentation, please refer to the source code documentation generated
by the Doxygen automatic documentation tool. Application Note AVR1923
describes the XMEGA-A3BU Xplained hardware in detail.

Figure 1-1. The XMEGA-A3BU Xplained Board

8-bit Atmel
Microcontrollers

Application Note

Rev. 8413A-AVR-09/11

2 Modules and services

This demo application is available through the Atmel® AVR® Software Framework
(ASF), version 2.6.0 or later. It is available at the Atmel.com AVR Software

Framework page. The demo application is available as an example project in AVR

Studio 5. This can be accessed by clicking File → New → Example Project, and
selecting “Demo application for XMEGA-A3BU Xplained”.

Table 2-1. List of services and modules

Module name Source file Header file

LCD panel and controller st7565r.c st7565r.h

QTouch button - touch_api.h

NTC temperature sensor ntc_sensor.c ntc_sensor.h

Ambient light sensor lightsensor.c lightsensor.h

Battery backed Real Time
Counter

Monochrome Graphics
System (gfx_mono)

Menu system menu.c menu.h

Calendar service calendar.c calendar.h

USB CDC service cdc.c cdc.h

rtc32.c rtc32.h

gfx_mono.c gfx_mono.h

2.1 LCD panel and controller

The XMEGA-A3BU Xplained board features a monochrome LCD (liquid crystal
display), which is a bundle containing an LCD controller (ST7565R) and an LCD
panel (C12832_A1Z), with white backlight.

The LCD controller offers two different interfacing modes:

1. Parallel interface mode in which display data is written by the master MCU

2. Serial interface mode where the master MCU produces a clock and a serial data

The latter mode is selected for this board. The advantage of using the serial interface
is that the number of pins is kept to a minimum, while the main disadvantage is that
one can only write to the display, as reading of display data is only supported when
using the parallel interface.

Five pins are needed to connect the master MCU to the LCD controller in serial
interface mode:

• Chip select, used to tell the LCD controller that it is the intended target for the

• Register select, used to signal whether the transmission contains data (HIGH), or

• Reset (active LOW), used to perform a hard reset of the LCD controller and the

(XMEGA for this board) to the controller memory, eight bits at a time using eight
data lines for the transfer.

signal, generally known as SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface).

serial transmission

a command (LOW)

default SPI data and clock pins

2

AVR1934

8413A-AVR-09/11