V-USB is a software-only implementation of a low-speed USB device for Atmel’s AVR® microcontrollers, making it possible to build USB hardware with almost any AVR® microcontroller, not requiring any additional chip.
My goodness. Thank you *so* much for making the USBTiny ISP kit!… Thank you for sharing the fruits of your talents and work with those of us at home trying to learn how these things work. Without people like you and Windell & Lenore over at EMSL, I would never have started down this path. I’m having a great time, and my 9yo son is as well. He’s thoroughly intrigued by electronics and programming, and the tools you offer are an enormous help for us!
simavr is a new AVR simulator for linux, or any platform that uses avr-gcc. It uses avr-gcc own register definition to simplify creating new targets for supported AVR devices. The core was made to be small and compact, and hackable so allow quick prototyping of an AVR project. The AVR core works more or less perfectly now. The simulator loads ELF files directly, and there is even a way to specify simulation parameters directly in the emulated code using an .elf section.
Building the AVR toolchain by hand also thwarted me somewhere in the building of the avr-binutils package — it doesn’t want to build on my Mac. As soon as I entered the dependency hell of installing an upgraded gcc to build binutils and that didn’t work either, I got pretty fed up with that line of attack. Finally, I tried installing the AVR toolchain from the Fink project. Success! Here are the steps it took to get it up and running…
To program the ATtiny13 or other AVR tiny microcontrollers I use the USBtinyISP. It is a diy build programmer, you can buy a package and you only need to solder. The nice thing is that it works with USB and can power the circuit directly. More information about the programmer can be found here: http://www.ladyada.net/make/usbtinyisp/ I use Windows Vista for programming. USBtinyISP uses an USB driver to work under Windows. This works good on 32 bit Vista system, but on 64 bit system you need to disable Windows check of unsigned drivers. This can be done by pressing F8 during boot and selecting a boot option at the bottom. This needs to be done every time you want to program the microcontroller. Perhaps a reader knows a solution to that? Please post in the comments. The USBtinyISP is cheap and works great…
The Chameleon uses an Atmel AVR ATMega 328P as the main master processor (client) and Parallax multicore Propeller chip, includes the Arduino bootloader too -
The Chameleon(TM) AVR 8-Bit is the evolution of the high performance, small footprint, application development board. Similar to the BASIC Stamp(TM) and Arduino(TM) in concept, the Chameleon takes these products to the next level with a huge leap in computational performance as well as I/O interfaces. Simply put, the Chameleon is a credit card sized computer with (2) processors, (9) processing cores, 1 MByte of on board FLASH, 64K of EEPROM, and over 170 MIPS of processing power! If that wasn’t enough, the numerous I/O interfaces include composite video for NTSC/PAL generation, VGA, audio out, PS/2 for keyboards and mice. Additionally, the Chameleon has a number of digital I/Os and Analog inputs making the Chameleon perfect for industrial controllers, experimentation, education, wearable computing, or hobbyist use.
Experiments in RFID, continued… Last time, I posted an ultra-simple “from scratch” RFID reader, which uses no application-specific components: just a Propeller microcontroller and a few passive components. This time, I tried the opposite: building an RFID tag using no application-specific parts. Well, my solution is full of dirty tricks, but the results aren’t half bad. I used an Atmel AVR microcontroller (the ATtiny85) and a coil. That’s it. You can optionally add a couple of capacitors to improve performance with some types of coils, but with this method it’s possible to build a working RFID tag just by soldering a small inductor to an AVR chip…
Blank ATMEGA8 with internal 1 MHz oscillator selected
28-DIP socket
6-pin ISP AVR programming header
0.1uF ceramic capacitor
5mm diffused red LED
Resistor for LED
We suggest using this board in conjunction with a USBtinyISP programmer (not included), and having the programmer provide USB power to the board. Of course, any programmer can be used, just make sure that you also power the target board somehow.
Micah writes -
