DonsDeals Blog: AVR Programming 01: Introduction

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Saturday, October 23, 2010

AVR Programming 01: Introduction - Hack a Day

AVR Programming 01: Introduction
posted Oct 23rd 2010 9:00am by Mike Szczys
filed under: Microcontrollers, how-to

We love looking at hardcore electronics projects with a beefy
microcontroller and hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of code at its
center. But everyone needs to get there somehow.

This tutorial series aims to make you comfortable programming the Atmel
AVR line of microcontrollers. Whether you've never touched a
microcontroller before, or you've cut your teeth with dozens of Arduino
projects, this will help you get right down to the hardware and give you
the confidence to build anything.

Prerequisite knowledge

Here's the good news: I've set the bar quite low. You need basic
knowledge of installing programs on your computer and using them. You
should have some idea of how a solderless breadboard works and it is
advisable that you have a multimeter and know how to measure voltage
with it. And you shouldn't be afraid of using Google to research
questions that aren't explicitly answered here.

What does a microcontroller actually do?

This is a loaded question. For the sake of understanding I'll take this
down to the most simple explanation:

A microcontroller takes some type of input
It makes a decision based on the software you have written
The outputs are changed based on the decision in step 2.
A microcontroller does what you program it to do. It does so quickly,
and reliably.

How does it work?

For this tutorial series I will be discussing digital logic. That is to
say that all input and output pins will be judged based on a voltage of
zero, or 5V. This produces our digital 1′s and 0′s, with 5 volts as a
one, and zero volts as a zero.

So if you want to light up an LED just wire up the circuit to a pin,
make that pin an output, and set it to a logic high (5 volts). If you
want to add a button, connect it to a pin that is set as an input and
program the chip to measure the voltage level of that pin. It really is
that easy, once you learn how to write the correct commands so that the
chip understands your wishes.

A look at he chip itself

I've decided to use an ATmega168 microcontroller. It's a powerful chip
but it's no harder to start using than its younger brethren. It will
leave plenty of room for you to grow into your projects, while remaining
affordable (less than $4.50). Here's a diagram of it:

This is often called the pinout as it shows what each of the 28 pins on
the chip actually does. All of these pins have multiple functions and
that's why there's long lines of text next to each, except for five
which only have one name. These are the pins having do with voltage and
ground (VCC, GND, AVCC, AREF, AGND), an important issue with
microcontrollers.

Integrated circuits need a steady voltage source. This means as part of
our project we'll need to build a voltage regulator. This is an easy
thing to do on a breadboard, and you should be able to get your hands on
the parts locally. It is also worth noting that there is a semi-circular
dimple on the top of the chip. This is something you'll find in the
plastic case of these dual-inline-package chips an it's used to make
sure you don't plug it in backwards.

Take a look at the pinout once again and look for the pins whose names
start with PD. You should see eight of them total, labeled PD0 through
PD 7. This is a fantastic example of the 8-bit nature of these chips. PD
stands for Port D, one of the input and output register. Everything in
these chips centers around 8-bits. That's a sequence of eight 1′s or
zeros in different combination. If you want to turn on or off specific
features, you change one or more bits in a 8-bit register. Every time
you want to change one pin you must address all eight in the register.
We'll learn much more about this but not until the third part of the series.

Programming

The ATmega168 is a programmable microcontroller. But better yet, it's
reprogrammable. In fact, when you're working on a project you'll most
likely reprogram it several times an hour.

This chip has a size limit of 16 kilobytes of programming space. In
these modern times of 64 gigabyte iPods 16 kilobytes might sound
minuscule. But in reality that's 16 kilobytes of machine code. You can
do a lot with that… trust me.

You do need some type of hardware to get the code onto these chips.
Usually this comes in the form of an AVR programmer. In the second part
of this tutorial we'll look at several different programming options,
then build and program a test circuit.

Do Your Homework
To get ready for the rest of this tutorial series I need you to gather
some tools. You must have some type of computer, be it a Linux box, Mac,
or Windows PC. This will run software that takes our code, compiles it
into something the microcontroller can use, and then tells a programmer
how to write it to our chip.

The compiler

We're eventually going to be writing our own code for the AVR, which
uses the RISC architecture. But we're doing this on a computer with x86
architecture. The tool necessary to accomplish this is called a
cross-compiler. This is quite possibly the best reason to choose AVR for
development, there's an excellent tool chain available that can easily
be installed on multiple platforms.

Mac users: Install CrossPack
Windows users: Install WinAVR
Linux users: Debian and Ubuntu users should install the GCC-AVR package
which includes the entire toolchain. Others may want to look at the
AVR-libc toolchain page for help compiling the packages.
This is not the only option. Many Windows users swear by Atmel's free
AVR Studio software. This is the only time I'll reference it as I don't
have a Windows machine and have never tried that package.

Programming software

Our software-of-choice to run the hardware programmer is called AVRdude.
If you installed one of the toolchains above you should already have
this program. Go to a terminal window or the command prompt and type the
following to make sure:

avrdude -h
This will show the help screen. If you get an error, you should check to
make sure you properly installed the toolchain in the previous step, or
go download AVRdude yourself.

What the future holds
That wraps up the introductory installment of this series.

Part 2: In the next installment of this series we'll take a look at
several pieces of hardware that you can use to program an AVR
microcontroller. I've written a hello world program and will walk you
through building the circuit on a breadboard, connecting the chip to a
programmer, and using AVRdude to write this simple firmware to the
device. I don't want to get you too excited, but this does involve a
flashing LED.

Part 3: A pre-compiled HEX file was used to program the AVR
microcontroller in Part 2 of the series. In this portion we'll look at
the C language source code that made up that firmware. I'll also talk
in-depth about the peripherals available on the chip and detail how to
use them. We'll finish up by adding functionality to the original
program, recompile it, and reprogram the chip with the upgraded version.

Part 4: Now that you've acquired AVR programming skills I'll show you
how to start building cool stuff with them.