Last week I purchased the AVR ISP mkII programmer for the Atmel AVR series of chips and I had previously bought some ATtiny26 chips for use in motor controllers, line sensors, etc.
I set up AVR Studio 4 on Windows and it seemed to work out nicely although I didn't actually try any programming. I booted my Ubuntu linux and installed the avr stuff which also seemed to work out nicely. I also did a small blinking LED program in C to test it out and it worked out nicely with the avr-gcc and all.
My overall plan is to upgrade my RC monster truck which was previously controlled by a PICAXE 40X1 in a simple line following configuration. The new version will have several modules that will communicate over I2C and RS232 (for talking with the CMUCam3). Overall control will be handled by an LPC-2106 ARM7 controller. The main goal for this truck is still to do fairly well in the DTU RoboCup competition. Last year was a disaster!
I read the datasheet for the ATtiny26 and that little critter is a very nice critter. It comes in a 20-pin DIP and has 11ADC channels (!), 2 PWM outputs and hardware supported I2C communication. Of course it is not as cheap as getting free PIC samples from Microchip, but each chip cost me around 5 USD so it's no big deal.
Nice. The AVRs looked interesting, and I like that there’s a gcc module for it so that you can compile it in Linux with standard tools. (I’m using SDCC to program my PICs in Linux, but it seems to use its own dialect of C, so most PIC code I find online doesn’t compile in SDCC without porting it). Eventually I’d like to pick up an AVR programmer and learn to program those chips too. Thanks for the post.
I love AVR, trouble is it takes sooo very long to get from your idea to it actually working, i bulk bough a load of the ATTINY13’s for the firefly project by mr alex weber - http://www.instructables.com/id/Synchronizing-Fireflies/ have quite a few of these now and they work a treat lovely in fact.
How many do you have? I’ve How many do you have? I’ve got one here I’m using, and I wouldn’t mind getting a couple more. I could pay you with paypal for shipping or something.
Got me an olimex stk500v2, ATtiny13 and one of the boards.
After much fiddling around and several days of trying to figure some of this sh!t out, I finally got things working.
Originally I had tried to breadboard the ATiny13 but that didn’t work so I opted to get one of the proto boards.
I think I got the blink working, though with some borrowed code that I don’t know if it should have a certain define…but i do get voltage spikes(no leds connected at the moment) on the pins I have set up.
Now to learn what the heck all of the avrstudio stuff is…
Seems that the avr has a huge following, but it’s pretty scattered and finding info on just learning some stuff is not centrally located…Does anyone have any recommendations? I’ve been to avrfreaks…I done lookups on google…been to hackaday…just doesn’t seem like there are any good tutorials or even getting started pages…
Maybe I’ll add my exp to my blog so people can learn from my exp.
Welp, I’ve got to head to work right now, but I’ll write something up on my exp with the setup that I have when I get home this eve. It took a while to learn what is what due to just attempting different things and not knowing what I was doing.
The topics I’ll touch on are.
The chip, the programmer, the board setup, the avrstudio app, things I learned on how to set everything up and some very useful tips and tricks that saved my ass from fuse hosage. I think it’s pretty simple after you know some of the basics. I’ll take a look at those links though as well as they might cover some of the same material.
lovely in fact.