12/20/2008

After playing around with the AVR chips for a little bit I'm pretty happy with the results. I'm carrying several models of the chips in my store and I have a decent collection of tools.

I've ordered an Iduino board from Fundamental Logic they have a very good deal on a Arduino compatible board that can plug in into a solderless breadboard. I'm considering doing a tutorial for beginners using the Arduino software which is much easier for a newbie to learn compared to C.

Under Construction

 This AVR project as much as I would like to get back to it, is on hold for now due to work time demands. I'm also taking a lot of my spare time the little there is and working on a group buy of parts.

I have not had a lot of experience with the AVR CPU chips but lately I have been writting some test programs for the ATMega88 CPU chip, and I am very pleased.

Several good things right off the bat about the AVR family of chips;

1. They are fast, and consume little power.
2. The hardware is easy to work with.
3. They have a decent instruction set, that makes possible efficient compilers, and easier to deal with in assembler code.
4. They are inexpensive
5. They have a lot of tools available besides the C compilers from ATMEL, tools such as Basic, Pascal, C, Forth are available in several flavors and for reasonable prices.
6. Very inexpensive development boards are available from SparkFun, FuturLec and other places, besides it's easy to put a board together.
7. Programmers tools such as programmers, ICE are reasonably priced.

Of course some of the above items could also be said for other CPU families.

For my little adventure into the world of AVR's I have aquired the following;

1. Several Development boards from SparkFun Electronics, in 28pin and 40 pin CPU models
2. Development board for the ATMEGA128 from Futurelec, and the AVR USB board from Atmel.
3. ATMEL Butterfly and a carrier board from Smiley Micro
4. AVRISP compatible programmers both serial and parallel port versions from SparkFun
5. CPU chips in several flavors, ATTiny44, 45, 84, and Mega48, 88, 168, 644, 128(board form)
6. AVR Dragon, a ISP programmer with a JTAG, and DebugWire debuggers, covers all the AVR family.
7. AVR JTAGICE MKII programmer/Debugger
   
8. Assorted, switches, leds displays, resistor, voltage regulator, port expanders, and breadboard units to experiment with.
9. Sample software of BASCOM-AVR, MikroPascal, MikroBasic, AVRco Pascal compilers.
10. Resident Forth compiler, I have not tried out this software yet.

Later I will have a review of those four commercial development system. So far the results are surprising, the software that looks the best on paper and is vastly more expensive is in last place.