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Today I went to Atmel's 2005 Microcontroller Seminar series in my
lovely homeown. I usually like to attend these because 1) they give
away cool stuff and 2) there is usually a good lunch involved.
This time 'round I didn't win anything, but the lunch was good.
They gave out their (now) standard
Butterfly kit,
based on the AVR Mega 169. It comes with some nifty software (you can
display a geeky scrolling nametag) and a bootloader so you can quickly
upload new programs via
AVR Studio. You can solder headers to the provided through-holes and use it as a nice and compact robot controller.
Digikey sells it for $20.