GoKawiilHosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller.
2026-05-11
2026-05-14
In today's episode of "dumb things to do with an AVR microcontroller":
Does your server come with real wood?
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:
CPU: Single 8-bit AVR core @ 24 MHz (max) RAM: 8 kB (static RAM) Flash: 64 kB EEPROM: 256 bytes Voltage: 1.8 - 5.5 Volts Cost: $1
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.
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