Avr Projects Equipment

Depends on how much you want to do yourself vs buy. Regarding available tools, that depends on what OS you are running.

About the cheapest way to get started is to make your own programming cable and use free programming software like AVRDUDE. See the following link for both the cable and AVRDUDE:

Note the very simple programmer in the photo - just a cable that connects the programming pins of the AVR processor to the parallel port.

The price goes up from there. Check Dontronics for some inexpensive programmers (DT006 comes to mind) which is also supported by AVRDUDE.

Atmel also makes a $30 programmer available from a number of places. I recall Digikey having it, look for AVRISP.

As far as actual processors go, most recent AVRs (ATmega's, AT90S's, and ATtiny's) have an on-board oscillator and require no external components, so implementation can be very simple, especially for DIP packages. If you want to use their more powerful processors, such as the ATmega128 which are surface mount only - check my web site for a couple of ready-made PCB's available:

You can buy bare PCB, a kit, or fully assembled and tested.

Other programming options include Atmel's own AVRStudio (Window's only). For a C compiler, take a look at AVR-GCC (see the AVRFreaks web site):

For programming in Basic - lots of folks like BASCOM-AVR:

See the "Dev tools" section of my web site for more options:

Good luck!

-Brian

Thanks a lot for your recommendations.They were very helpful.I would some additional informations. I want to develop my projects on a linux Os so i would like some new infos about linux ----> avr software tools.Thanks in advance again.

Nikolas

I primarily use FreeBSD Unix and the toolset for Linux should be similar. In a nutshell, I use avr-gcc for my C compiler, avrdude for downloading code to the target, avarice and avr-gdb with JTAGICE hardware for source level debugging with breakpoints, etc.

For an overview, see:

This site will have links to the various tools.

I use avr-gcc for my C compiler:

AVR support is part of the mainline gcc distribution, so it is easy to cross build for the AVR target. If you use FreeBSD, you can just do this to install avr-gcc:

cd /usr/ports/devel/avr-gcc && make install

You'll also want avr-libc, a C Library implemention for the AVR target:

This gives you all the C-runtime stuff like printf(), etc. Even malloc() is supported.

Again, if you use FreeBSD, installation is simple:

cd /usr/ports/devel/avr-libc && make install

I use AVRDUDE as the programmer. I am the author, so of course I prefer AVRDUDE, but UISP is also popular:

Simple installation on FreeBSD:

cd /usr/ports/devel/avrdude && make install

UISP:

For advanced debugging using the JTAGICE hardware, you can use AVARICE and AVR-GDB:

To install on FreeBSD, just do this:

cd /usr/ports/devel/avarice && make install cd /usr/ports/devel/avr-gdb && make install

GDB now supports the AVR target in its main distribution so it is easy to cross build for it.

I hope this is helpful. Best of luck!

Cheers,

-Brian

THANKS Brian everything was very helpful!

try: