Have you ever needed to look at what is going on on a serial port and not have a PC/smartphone around because the location was a bit inaccessible? I did not need this until now, but now I do, so I was looking for a solution. After building this, I think that it would be a good addition to the modified programmer.
This is a quick and dirty solution, i scavenged of the build of the ESP8266 test rig which uses the XMEGA header board. It’s using a IL9341 driven 2.2″ 320×240 LCD connected over SPI on PORTC (see code for exact details). I used a rather small font(10×16) to be able to show a reasonable amount of text, 20 lines and 24 characters per line. The LCD is used in portrait mode, since it only supports hardware driven scroll on the vertical and I did not want to spend time with more complicated code to copy memory. Even the hardware scrolling functions were missing from the ASF driver implementation for Xmega. Without hardware scroll feature, there would be a lot of time wasted moving data around the memory, and getting a reasonably fast response would require a lot of SW optimization.
Two hardware UARTs are used to monitor a bidirectional serial port communication between 2 devices, the one on PORTC and the one on PORTE. This allows the micro to know from where to where the data is going and display both in different colors, white or green, color matched to the input wires.
Since it needs to be portable, it is powered by 3xAA batteries. Current consumption is under 50mA, so that should be over 50 hours of operation. Additionally the micro supply is brought out, so it can be powered by the external circuit or provide power to it.
Here are a few pictures of the build and a video of booting up a router:
