Historically I have worked with PICAXE controllers but am looking into playing with AVR controllers. My question is this:
The Arduino is the hardware development platform for ATMEGA chips?
If I understand correctly, C/C++ is what is used. this works out well since I have been a web developer for years and have plenty of C based programming experience.
Can anyone confirm or deny my assumptions? Any other “getting started” advice is warmly welcome.
The Arduino can be programmed in assembler or C, and a user-friendly development system based on C but suitable for complete beginners is available. See the Arduino website.
Leon
So do certain Arduino dev boards only work for specific ATMEGA chips?
Once development is done, the MCU is yanked from the Arduino and placed in a final circuit?
When I buy an ATMEGA chip, does it need to have the Andurino boot strap loaded?
Thanks for answering newbie questions.
lots of help, tools, products and insights on this forum
kankatee:
So do certain Arduino dev boards only work for specific ATMEGA chips?A: Yes
Once development is done, the MCU is yanked from the Arduino and placed in a final circuit?
A: for such a goal, one normally uses an AVR compatible development board such as STK500 or one of ETT’s low cost boards, or one as you see here on SFE. Arduino is one of many, but Arduino is unique in having a simplified version of the freeware C compiler/library. There are several good compilers for AVRs: Codevision, IAR, ImageCraft, and Rowley which is an IDE used with freeware GCC. Atmel’s free AVR Studio includes GCC. The commercial compilers have the advantage of intrinsic support of the Harvard architecture and this makes a big difference and justifies $200 or so in many cases. For hobby uses, I heartily recommend ZBasic.net modules and their excellent free compiler that is VB6-like - two versions. It would be great if SFE resold those products.
When I buy an ATMEGA chip, does it need to have the Andurino boot strap loaded?
A: If you purchas an Arduino board/chip it’ll have that flavor of bootstrap pre-installed. Else you must have an ISP or JTAG device ($15 and up) to store a bootstrap in the flash memory, or don’t use a bootstrap and use the ISP/JTAG for all downloading. There are many free bootloaders for the AVR. The best one must be BLIPS on the Projects Section uploads of AVRfreaks.net (since I contributed that one!)
Thanks for answering newbie questions.