I often see quite large scale projects online made with Arduinos, but as a person who has moved from AVRs to Arduino what I see doesn’t make a lot of sense. The arduino is essentially a prototyping device and while there is nothing really wrong with using it in a final design, much can be gained from moving away from it. Just to clarify: I understand that an arduino is built around an AVR, but the problem is that much of the power (and complexity) is abstracted away by the software. Perhaps it’s just me, but I like to know exactly what is going on inside my processor. On top of this, AVR Simulator is a godsend for hunting down that last bug.
The real reason behind this whole thing is price. From Little Bird, the cheapest Arduino is $17.50 while the sale is on, and that has no USB chip on it. The ones with the USB chip are >$40, not to mention the price of accessories. An Atmega88 at Futurlec is $3.80, a crystal is $1, caps are a few cents and so is the pullup resistor for reset (this will all be explained in a later post).
Development Environment
The basic tools I use for AVR development are:
- AVR Studio - A free IDE with AVR Simulator built in
- WinAVR – A free C compiler for AVRs (based on gcc) and other tools
- STK500 – There is a multitude of free or prebuilt development boards on the net
You won’t need any of these till the next tutorial; we are just going to talk about hardware for now. Continue reading ‘Graduating from Arduino to AVR’