Apparently, Leonardo and Uno are very similar boards.
However, despite that, and both have the same flash memory size, the Leonardo bootloader is considerably bigger than the Uno bootloader (4 KB vs. 0.5 KB).
What would be the reason? Is there a way to use a smaller bootloader on the Leonardo?
Uno specifications: UNO R3
Leonardo specifications: Leonardo
1 Answer 1
Apparently leonardo and UNO are very similar boards.
No, they are very, very different.
The Uno uses an external USB-UART bridge. This means that the bootloader code only has to read from the UART in order to program the device.
The Leonardo has USB support built into the MCU. This means that the bootloader must contain an entire USB Device stack in order to process the USB packets and then pass the payload to the programming routines.
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