Support for MT-DB-X5 board

[yzubkov]

Just curious how I would go about adding support for MT-DB-X5 board. Would I just copy the MT-DB-U4 section in the "boards.txt" file and modify with parameters specific to X5? Anyone cares to share their boards.txt section that is specific to the ATXMega32E5?

Interesting why this X5 board is still sold on the website, yet does not have the same support in Arduino IDE as other boards. Thanks!

[mattairtech]

The XMEGAs are not supported with this core (nor are they supported by the stock Arduino AVR core). The reason is that while the XMEGA instruction set is mostly the same as the MEGAs, the peripherals are completely different. Much of the code deals with peripherals, so there is a lot of porting work. I have considered doing an XMEGA core, but there had not been much interest (engineers tend to buy these boards more frequently than enthusiasts, and they don't use Arduino as much). The XMEGA does finally seem to be getting more popular though. So, I have decided that I will work on this, but, I have no time this month. I am currently adding SAMD51 (Cortex M4F) support to Arduino, as well as working on new hardware, but I should be able to get started in December.

Please post any suggestions here.

[yzubkov]

Glad to hear that you have decided to add support for XMega. At the moment Arduino support surrounding Xmega boards is confusing and frustrating as there are 2 separate GitHub repos that target Xmega support for Arduino. They probably share the same XMega core yet is is not clear why would someone fork an existing core without providing any hints or any documentation as to why the original core is no longer suitable.

1. XMegaduino: core
2. XMegaForArduino: core

Given the quality of documentation for the ATMega development boards that you currently support, I am glad that you will be working on bringing support for ATXMega to Arduino community. We might finally have a chance to see an Xmega development board that has proper documentation and setup instructions.