Atmel AVR Overview

Overview

This will be a general overview of the Atmel AVR microcontroller. I plan to discuss the resources, hardware, programmers/debuggers, and software tools that are available. The reason I am providing this information is because my first project is going to involve designing a new robot brain based off the ATmega328. Now this is a large amount of information, so I am going to break it up into small, easily digested pieces. I will also leave out some material for you to explore on your own.

Main Resources

The main resource for anything dealing with the AVR is the Atmel web site. There you can download data sheets, app notes, and AVR Studio – the tool for designing the software you will download into your AVR project. Looking over the 8 bit devices you will notice 3 main families. The “Tiny”, “Mega”, and “Xmega” series. There are a few others, but we will be working with these families. The Tiny is your reduced pin count, very low-cost part. The Mega is your mid range part with more pins, more features, with a moderate price increase. The newest series is the Xmega. This part was designed to compete with Microchip‘s PIC24F (16 bit) series and Texas Instrument’s MSP430 (16 bit) series of devices. The Xmega includes DMA channels, higher clock speeds, and an Event System. I would suggest you check out Atmel’s web site for more information. As we continue along, I will be presenting this in greater detail, but for now I am just giving you the highlights.

The next place I would look for information would be the AVR Freaks forum. Checking out the forum, you will find more information than you can digest. Lucky for us the broke it down into sections. I follow a few of the sections (threads) like hardware, AVR Studio, and the avr-gcc compiler thread. You can also post questions to the forum, but I have a few suggestions. Don’t post any questions without doing some research first. Search to see if the question has already been answered. Your question should be as specific as possible – they will not do your work for you. Try to give as much detail as you can about your issue. Finally try to post the question in the most relevant thread. Following these simple suggestions will get you quicker responses. So check out the forum at AVR Freaks.

Moving on…

This is just the beginning. I will keep posting more information as we go along. Once I have completed this overview, we will be going right into designing the new brain. Though the design is for a robot, it can still be used as a general learning tool or even the brain for whatever you can dream up. Until next time, check out the sites I mentioned.