USPprog (available here) is a very useful tool. I mainly use it as a AVRISP mk2 clone. This is done by flashing an AVRISP mk2 emulation firmware in the µC of the USBprog. Tools for doing that are available for the command line and also as GUI. I’ve ordered the parts together with some ATMega32 µCs and a prototype board. Since the USBprog consists of very few parts it can be easily soldered even by not so experienced users. The result looks like this:
The difficult part is to flash the boot loader SW on it. It’s a chicken/egg problem. I want to flash a SW on a µC that I want to use for flashing a µC. But with an old PC that has a parallel port it can be done.
After that I had a working USBprog. On the right you can see the USB port and on the left the cable used to connect to the µC.
Tag: atmega
Justification
Having a complete PC is a good thing, but for controlling small things like a light it’s way too big and expensive, so I’ve decided to use smaller processors for that. After some research I ended up with the AVR micro controllers made by Atmel. They are easily available and affordabel and what is even more important: An open source toolchain consisting of avr-gcc and avr-libc exists and even the hardware I’ll be using for programming the µCs is open source: USBprog.
Hello world!
With some help of Alex this is now working and I can say “Hello world”
Whatever blogs were originally invented for, I’ll use it mainly as a documentation tool for my struggles with the atmega32.