Has anyone used ATMEL's AVR Butterfly and the free WinAVR? I was wondering how hard it is to use and what book(s) were found instructive.
Has anyone used ATMEL's AVR Butterfly and the free WinAVR? I was wondering how hard it is to use and what book(s) were found instructive.
I've not used the Butterfly, but I have used (extremely familiar with) AVR devices. Most are programmed in the same manner. Basically, if you have an AVR board, it will likely have a 6-pin or 10-pin DIL header connector, and this is used for programming with a low-cost USB programmer called AVR-ISP mk II (it comes with both the 6-pin and 10-pin mating connector).
Some of the AVR range have a USB port and can be programmed via USB without the AVR-ISP, using some free software from the Atmel website (this relies on a 'bootloader' on the AVR, but if the bootloader gets erased, I think (not sure) that you'd need the AVR-ISP method to reprogram). The risk of erasing the bootloader is possibly low.
If you're interested in AVRs, then AVR-ISP is a low-cost, valuable investment - it works with all (or most) of the AVR range.
Regarding developing for it, it's very easy. WinAVR is highly regarded. Although I like GCC, for AVR I use IAR (they have a free 'kickstart edition' AVR compiler which is code size limited but in practice the code limit is adequate), because their development environment is quite nice.
I wrote up some steps on how to get started with AVR a while back, maybe it will help (attached).
| programming_microcontrollers3.pdf |
