| Date Posted: Saturday, May 22, 2010
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AVR Microcontroller
Article By Pratik Deshpande
Founder and Chief Mentor at DeccanRobots (Now Embedded Market)
© Copyright Article
Microcontroller is the core element in any embedded systems design. Embedded systems like temperature controller & display unit on from panel of AC, a cell phone, tiny MP3 player, digital cameras, elevator controller etc are some of the examples of embedded systems.
Deccanrobots is born with a slogan "Microcontrollers Simplified". And thus we deliver our slogan via making best possible and affordable tools and equipments required during development of embedded system.
If you are designing a simple on / off timer, temperature data logger or a security system, we have some thing for everyone.
Apart from designing and selling tools required for embedded design, here is my initiative to guide readers like you for embedded system design .
Microcontroller is the most interesting topic in the field of electronics. Remember that designing microcontroller based system is not a job of hadware design, but its a software degning.
Opp!!! Where is the software here. Software is inside the microcontroller.
I know that you must be thinking, how to store software inside the microcontrolelr, will it have any operating system, and what about the hardware part of the system design.
All queries running through your mind will be answered under the series of my articles. This article will focus on the AVR Microcontroller and its applications.
AVR microcontrollers are made by ATMEL and the name AVR is derived from the inventors of it's design at ATMEL design center.
AVRs are available in variety of pin sizes from smallest 8 pin to as big as over 100 pins. AVR microcontrollers are available in 8bit and 32 bit versions.
Embedded system designer gets a real wide choice from this series of AVR controller. And the most important is the source code written from one AVR microcontroller (e.g. ATmega8) can be easily used for another AVRs (e.g. ATmega128) with little modification (few lines of changes).
This makes it very popular among students, industrial users and educational domain.
Availability of variety of free tools has made AVR popular and easy to implement.
Here is the list of setup required for AVR based product design:
1. IDE to write source code: WinAVR, AVR Studio (Both free)
2. Experiment boards with cables for AVR
3. Programmer for AVR
4. Other regular equipments line multimeter, PC / Laptop
Once you have this list ready with you, you may start AVR programming.
To start with, ATmega8 or Atmega32 are the best suitable for beginner like you.
I prefer to use C langiage for programming with AVR. This allows me to concentrate on the design part.
Next article will explain the first program with ATmega32 AVR mcirocontroller.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. If your college / University is looking for AVR Microcontroller training workshop, do contact us. We have nice short duration workshop planned for you along with various AVR Kits as give away.
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