Setting up AVR development platform

You can be encouraged to use various types of AVR development tools. Most of them cost money to get full functionality and support. All they are great tools out of the box with fast support that you have to pay. Of course, you can give it a try with their limited versions to see capabilities. As we mentioned before, we will use free tools that are great enough compared to commercials. UPDATE! Here are the currently supported software options for AVR microcontroller development: WinAVR or AVR-GCC tools WinAVR is a toolset for C programming the AVR microcontrollers. It is a bunch of small programs that make development as comfortable as possible. The main tools are avr-gcc compiler, avrdude programmer, avr-gdb debugger, and more. These are command-line tools, so you need to integrate them into some integrated development environment (IDE). There can be any IDE supporting external tools like Eclipse and, of course AVRStudio that we will be using. Besides, WinAVR comes with great program writing tool – Programmers Notepad. Actually, with WinAVR, you can write, compile, upload to chip, and…

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Things needed before you learn AVR

There are several things you need to do before learning AVR. First of all, you need an AVR chip. You better choose megaAVR series, so you don’t need to worry about the lack of peripherals when required. Atmega8, Atmega16, or further mega’s will do correctly. Probably chose in DIP package as it will easily fit in breadboard for fast prototyping.  Development boards are great to work with, primarily designed for learning and prototyping.  Any Arduino board can be used with no problem, as it has all the necessary means to serve as a general-purpose dev board. Anyway, I leave this up you for a while. The next thing is the programmer. This is where you can get a headache. Really! In a few words, a programmer is a cable/device used to upload firmware (compiled program) to chip. Programmers can be connected to the computer via various ports, including parallel (LPT), serial (COM), and USB. Or there can be no programmer at all if the chip has a bootloader set up. But this will be discussed later. These were two hardware…

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