Is WINAVR crap or what?

The Eclipse IDE with the AVR plugin is really the way to go if you want to do AVR development:

Makes compiling C code for the AVR 1 click easy.

winavr is a compiler, why should it tell you how to write makefiles? it doesn't tell you how to program either

if you want an example makefile, download something made with winavr. could try something like:

otherwise something like:

avr-gcc main.c -o main.bin -mmcu=3Datmega8 avr-objcopy -j .text -j .data -O ihex main.bin main.hex

is a place to start

-Lasse

That's the problem with free opensource software: everyone gets exactly what he paid for. You are supposed either to hire a professional familiar with WinAvr; or buy an expensive commercial toolset (like IAR EWB) which simply works.

VLV

Another solution is to download the AVR Studio IDE from Atmel. That will make compilation easier, and you will also get debugging facilities with, say, an AVR Dragon.

Leon

You must be trying to use WINAVR under linux.

If you are using it under wondoZe, then install AVRstudio.

AVRstudio handles all the IDE stuff for you.

hamilton

It's not a bad port of gcc and lots of people are enthusiastic users. I'm not one.

Give the Imagecraft compiler a try. The full demo is time-limited to 45 days and then size-limited after that (non-commercial use). There's a nice IDE and quite a few examples to get you started. I've been using it commercially for quite some years.

...or Google and ask around and read whatever documenetation you can find until you figure it out...

I'd grant that the quality of documentation for free open-source tools is, on average, not as good as that for commercial tools... but there's certainly plenty of commercial tools out there with crap for documentation as well.

I use Eclipse for whatever microcontroller I need to program. I even wrote a wrapper around the Hi-tech PIC compiler so it behaves like GCC to Eclipse.

This is not a problem of WINAVR. It is a problem of the person doing the makefile.

Because "make" manual/instructions are all over the internet. Have you googled?

Yes, and be prepared to spend hundreds, if not thousands for a professional tool with supports.

Like windows.

google "winavr tutorial" brings up plenty of useful stuff, and so does "winavr makefile example", and "winavr example project"

There's plenty of documentation, but you'll have to look for it.

I tried the Eclipse with Hi Tech PIC C. It deleted my project files including source fand CAD files in the first hour (all backed up). I didn't try it for a second hour.

Funnily enough I feel software should be easy to use and if you need instructions to do the basics then it's bad software.

I don't want to write makefiles, so 1980s.

It has an editor with a make all function. But it gives an error because it can't make. I didn't find how to make it make. That is crap.

I used the mfile program to make a make file but programmers notepad doesn't seem to want to use it.

Downloading...

With gcc+make there's a certain learning curve for the basic stuff, but on the other hand, in return you get a tremendous flexibility to do more complicated stuff.

If you set it up properly, a single "make" command can produce 6 different versions of your software, burn the software into a device, run an automatic regression test, update the documentation, and copy the installation files to your website, as well as anything else that you want.

With an easy to use integrated environment where you can compile a program in 1 click, that's sometimes the only thing you can do.

If you're someone who's routinely been using *NIX command line tools for compiling/linking/building software, WinAVR probably would qualify as "easy to use."

But at someone else suggested... Google around for a few tutorials; I last used WinAVR back in 2004 and didn't have any particular difficulties that I recall. It did take some effort to find a good tutorial on how to use in-line assembly, but I remember being impressed at how "high level" the assembly was -- instead of having to use specific register names (and be aware of which ones the compiler used), you could use aliases like "T0" for a temporary registry that was guaranteed to be OK to trash without the C compiler minding.

---Joel

It's a commandline tool, it's to be expected that it will take some reading and thinking to make it do what you want.

expecting it to have a big green button that says do what I want is ......

-Lasse

RTM. Eclipse really beats any IDE I've used hands down so far.