Essentials in Developing AVR projects
Like any microcontroller projects, developing projects for AVR require some “investments”.
1. Microcontroller board
This contains the microcontroller that you are developing with. You may buy a commercially available microcontroller starter/evaluation/development board or you may build one yourself.
2. Programmer and Debugger
You will be creating programs for AVR but you need to load the program to the microcontroller using a programmer. A debugger is not a requirement but will help a lot in most cases. AVRISP and AVRISP mkII are good programmers. STK500 and STK600 is composed of a development board and programmer in one. AVR Dragon contains both programmer and debugger.
3. IDE or Integrated Development Environment
This is where you will be developing your microcontroller program. You need a good one that provides you with what you need.
A good IDE is AVR Studio by Atmel. It provides a complete set of features. It includes a debugger supporting run control including source and instruction-level stepping and breakpoints. It provides registers, memory and I/O views. It supports target configuration and management as well as full programming using standalone programmers.You may download it for free.
4. Compiler
I am recommending the GNU GCC compiler for C that is included in the WinAVR package because it is free, easy to use, and this is what I will use in this series of tutorials. WinAVR is an open-source development tool for AVR chips. The C compiler included in the WinAVR package converts the program written in C language into a language that the AVR can understand. Click this for more information about WinAVR and to download the latest WinAVR.
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