I bought a couple of these a few months ago. I've been toying with the
ATMEL processors and am familiar with the toolset. I have NOT
programmed the cards yet though.

The risc cards as Jim calls them are sold on the Internet as "Purple Fun
Cards" or "Purple Cards" or "Fun Cards". I saw some on ebay yesterday.
You can buy them in small quantities. I bought 2 but I forget the
price.

They are built on the ATMEL AT90S8515 processor and some amount of
serial EEPROM. The site I bought them from includes a simple schematic
indicating which ports are hooked up to what on the cards.

There is a GCC port for the 8515 processor. The processor line is
called 'AVR'. There are Debian packages for the GCC port called
avr-gcc. You can get detailed info on the processor and development
tools at http://www.atmel.com and http://www.avrfreaks.net.
AVRFreaks.net has a Windows port of the AVR-GCC package.

From what I've seen so far, the AVR line is very nice. It's fast and
the instruction set is simple and easy to use.

The processors can be programed through a serial protocol detailed in
the data sheets. The FunCards can be programmed using this same
interface. The correct pins are connected to the ISO7816 pads to do
this. I've seen devices for sale that are capable of programming these
cards. They are usually sold on the satellite tv cracker websites and
refered to as 'smart card programmers'. Some even say they can program
ATMEL chips. You could also build your own programmer hardware as the
circuits to do the programming are very simple. See the AVRFreaks
website for details on building serial programmers.

The down-side as I see it for using these cards are that you have a bare
microcontroller. There are no libraries for ISO protocols. You need to
implement everything from scratch, even the serial protocol must be
written. As I recall the AVR's built-in UART isn't even connected to
the ISO pads so you need to bit-bang the ISO serial protocol. Doable
but not simple.

The upside is the uC is high-performance, the tools are cheap/free and
easy to setup.

If anyone finds any more info on these, I'd be happy to hear it.

good luck,

-joe

On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 10:28, Jim Rees wrote:
> As far as I know, your only choice for a programmable non-interpreted card
> is the Atmel series. They used to have both an 8-bit (6800?) card and a
> risc card. You will have to assemble the sdk yourself from gnu tools. I
> don't know if you can get the cards in small quantity for a reasonable
> amount.
>
> Has anyone on this list actually used these cards? How hard is it to get
> the gnu based development environment set up?

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