atmel studio

[philba]

I hadn't done anything developing for bare AVRs in quite a while and recently decided to get a dragon. In the process I had to install Atmel Studio. Yikes!!! what a frickin pig of an install. 3 hours! I swear I though it was hung several times. This was on a pretty recent win7 machine with plenty of RAM and disk space. And all that microsoft bloatware. ugh. Had I known, I might have stuck to PICs. Well, not really but I wanted to vent. lol.

[adafruit_support_rick]

Which version?

I've been using 5.0 for almost a year, and I rather like it. I just installed 5.1 a couple of days ago, and only noticed one odd thing: I've been leaving the OCDEN fuse turned off all this time, debugging with a JTAGICE 3. Honestly, I have forgotten why I turned it off, but I have some vague recollection of reading somewhere that it was The Thing To Do when using JTAG.

Anyway, AVRStudio 5.1 would upload code, but refused to start it until I enabled on-chip debug. Even in release mode.

Otherwise, nothing really jumps out at me as a major difference between 5.0 and 5.1. But then, I haven't really done much with 5.1 yet.

I was perusing AVRFreaks a little this afternoon to try to get a feel for Studio 6, now that they've released their "production" version. Some evidence of heartburn, but the response seems mostly positive. Think I'll wait a little while longer before taking the plunge...

[ericgu]

I hadn't done anything developing for bare AVRs in quite a while and recently decided to get a dragon. In the process I had to install Atmel Studio. Yikes!!! what a frickin pig of an install. 3 hours! I swear I though it was hung several times. This was on a pretty recent win7 machine with plenty of RAM and disk space. And all that microsoft bloatware. ugh. Had I known, I might have stuck to PICs. Well, not really but I wanted to vent. lol.

I have a paid copy of CodeVision AVR - which is really nice for the wizard - but for the last straight AVR project I did, I used WinAVR, and I like it better than CodeVision for most things. The price is nice as well.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/winavr/files/

[philba]

I'm using 6.0. It looks like they tossed a lot more stuff into it.

[adafruit_support_rick]

Congrats! I've just elected you to become my guinea pig. Keep me posted.

[philba]

well this guinea pig got roasted and eaten...

Bricked a couple of chips simply trying to debug a simple program with debugwire (I didn't screw with the fuses). barf. Now I have to screw around with HV programming. What's the point of having a dragon if you can't use debugwire??? Found people bitching about this on avr freaks. It looks like just trying to debug via debugwire does the damage and you can't get the fuse reset via "disable debugwire". In AS6, it doesn't even give the option, in AS5 you get an error "object reference not set to an instance of an object". Nice, clear message. Atmel, you are not my favorite company right now. By the way, if I don't do debugwire stuff, I can read, write, verify the chips until I step on the debugwire landmine. Did this with 3 different AVRs (attiny 85 and 861, ATMega16) so I know it's wired correctly.

I downgraded to AS5 but problem persists. I don't feel like wiring up for HW programming tonight. grumble grumble. Atmel, you're not building loyalty here.

edit: changed can to can't. sheesh...

[adafruit_support_rick]

Pig roast! Where's the barbecue sauce? Mmm-mmm! That's gooood eatin'!!

Sorry. I feel your pain.

[inventorjack]

While I haven't used debugWire, I have had none of the problems you've experience. Install was rather straightforward, and took about 5-10 minutes. I then installed most of the extensions (for instance the QTouch stuff). Overall, the experience has been excellent, though I know there's a lot of (well-deserved) heartache in the community about Atmel Studio being Windows only.

My systems:
Computer 1: Desktop, Win 7 32-bit, 2GB RAM
Computer 2: Laptop, Win 7 64-bit, 4GB RAM