Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller
In today's episode of "dumb things to do with an AVR microcontroller":
MCU website demo (may go down if this gets posted to HN)
My victim is the AVR64DD32 which is quite similar to the Atmega328 of Arduino fame. Compared to the older Atmega, these AVR DD lines are cheaper for the same memory, use a single programming pin and have nicer peripherals:
So that's the computer (a rather spacious one at that) but it'll need an internet connection to host a website.
The obvious choice is Ethernet , but even the slowest version (10BASE-T) still runs at 10 megabits/second. Worse, it uses Manchester encoding: a zero is sent as "10" and a one as "01", so 10 megabits of data is actually 20 megabits at the wire.
This is simply too fast for the AVR to generate. While it's processor can run at 24 MHz, but all the peripherals and IO pins max out at a 12 MHz clock. (although some other 8-bit chips should be able to do it)