How do I program an Atmel microcontroller?

0	What IDE and programming language can I use to program an Atmel microcontroller? Can the same setup be used across all product lines? microcontroller atmel programming asked Feb 28 at 12:35 Ryan ♦ 201●3●11●15 edited Mar 02 at 13:04

4 Answers:

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All Atmel microcontrolers can be programed using some form of AVR Studio available from Atmel free of charge. AVR Studio 4 has built in capability to compile assembly and C for the AVR series chips. While these are not the only usable languages they are the most supported. All Atmel chips that I am aware of can be programmed using the JTAG programmer as well as several other methods. Most people choose alternatives to JTAG such as the extremely simple and cheap DAPA(Direct Access Programing Adapter) because of the much higher cost of a JTAG system.

answered Apr 04 at 00:53

bob657
121●6●4

Nice answer, and welcome to RoboFAQs!

(Apr 04 at 07:03) Rick Ross ♦♦

Very nice answer indeed !

(Aug 02 at 09:27) fabien7474

If you cannot or do not want to use AVR Studio, you can also write C with the AVR libc extensions and compile it with gcc. Atmel packages these tools for windows and some Linux distributions as the AVR32 GNU Toolchain, though you can build the tools on other systems without too much effort.

As for actually programming your chip after you have compiled your code, there are a few options. For programming hardware, the parallel port programmer linked to above (DAPA) worked quite well for me and was very simple to build. Atmel also makes a programming and debugging tool called AVR Dragon. That board uses a USB connection and supports In-System Programming (ISP), High Voltage Serial Programming (HV/HVSP), Parallel Programming, and JTAG Programming, as well as providing some great debugging features. They usually sell for $50 new, which is an amazing price for what you can do with it.

For programming software (what you need to run to send your code to the microcontroller over the hardware discussed above), there are multiple options. AVR Studio will obviously do this, since it is Atmel's complete IDE. The alternative included in the AVR32 GNU Toolchain is called avr32program, and there are other open source projects such as AVRDUDE which will do the same.

answered May 04 at 11:44