| Date Posted: Saturday, May 22, 2010
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ATmega
Article By Pratik Deshpande
Founder and Chief Mentor at DeccanRobots (Now Embedded Market)
© Copyright Article
ATmega is now a common term used by embedded system designers. ATmega is a series of microcontroller made by ATMEL.
AVR is a RISC platform based microcontroller and ATmega is subset of it. Other members of AVR are ATTiny, XMEGA, AT90 etc.
Each of these AVR family members have something unique to offer for system designers.
Success of AVR goes to easy and low cost availability of kits, programmers, IDEs, compilers and help forums.
AVR ATmega series of controllers have certain important features like :
- built in ADC with 10 bit resolution (No external ADC Chip required, space saving)
- PWM (No extensive coding required, simply set certain registers of Timer to generate PWM)
- Analog comparator (Compare analog inputs)
- built in oscillator (No external clock like crystal oscillator required)
- power on reset (No R-C circuit required for power on reset)
- 2.7 to 5V Vcc (Use it for battery powered application)
ATmega128 which is 64 pin 8 bit AVR microcontroller, has dual serial ports facility.
Against these features, if you look at the cost of tools, programmers, starter kits, IDEs, compliers required to get started, you will definetily will like to switch to AVR ATmega as your core microcontroller for the next project.
Here is simple analysis of initial cost:
Price of starter kits: US$ 49 / Rs. 1650
Price of programmer: US$ 10 / Rs. 300 to Rs. 2000
Price of IDE / Compiler: Free (WinAVR, AVRStudio)
This short writeup is intended to provide cost / benifit analysis for AVR ATmega controllers.
Thank you for reading.
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