I needed to use my AT90USBKEY at higher than 3.3V for ADC input purposes. It’s not documented in the manual, but the schematic shows they anticipated this. You can easily convert the AT90USBKEY to run on 5V with a few changes. The changes needed are:
- Remove resistor R20 (0-ohm resistor)
- Remove resistor R16 (0-ohm resistor)
- Place a 0-ohm resistor on pads at R21 (move R16 or R20)
That’s it! The DataFLASH chip’s VCC needs to be in the 2.5-3.6V range, but with those changes it is still powered by the 3.3V regulator. Thus you don’t need to remove the DataFLASH chips. The DataFLASH devices have 5V tolerant I/O, so even though your MCU is running at 5V, it won’t fry the DataFLASH. Note the logic high levels of the DataFLASH may not be sufficient to actually work with the MCU, since it’s logic high will only be using 3.3V logic.
The following diagram shows the changes, red = remove resistor, green = new resistor, yellow = optional change. I actually removed the DataFLASH in this photo only because I wanted the I/O lines the DataFLASH was using.
Note that D3 drops the 5V input to about 4.2V. The actual VCC with just the resistor change is 4.2V. If you want full 5V from the USB, you also need to remove diode D3 and replace with a short. This is the change highlighted in yellow above.
When running from 5V you need to ensure the USB regulator is enabled. If using LUFA make sure the ‘USB_OPT_REG_ENABLED’ is enabled. e.g. in the Makefile:
LUFA_OPTS += -D USE_STATIC_OPTIONS="(USB_DEVICE_OPT_FULLSPEED | USB_OPT_REG_ENABLED | USB_OPT_AUTO_PLL)"
Another hint too: If you aren’t removing resistors permanently, just slide them onto one of the pads. This way you won’t lose the parts when you want to put them back. For example when I was using the line with the HWB pushbutton:
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