AVR-Chat

Hi all,

I'm getting way ahead of myself vs. my understanding of programming 
as I have only started to read the C programming book.

I was wondering if there is a way to connect a uC to a PC via SC 
(serial cable) and input constants ?

What I am thinking about is making a timer.
I would input a value of say 1 minute to get the program running and 
then later, if I wanted to change the value, I'd like to only input 
that new value from a PALM or PC or something like that.

The idea is to not re-program the chip, but to only change a value or 
two.

I was thinking of using a jumper or switch to tell the AVR to look 
for the new values.

I'm just not sure how easy it would be to use a PC to change some 
values in the micro.

My goal is to create a data logger and to be able to set the time 
between each reading from a PC.  I would have 8 to 10 points that 
would need to be read and each would be a seperate timing value.

This is for a greenhouse and we would want soil moisture sampes only 
a few times a day but humidity and temperature samples much more 
frequently.

I am not sure if this is something that can be done from a existing 
software, or if I also need to learn Visual Basic......

Also, how-come-is-it that the more I learn, the father away my goal 
seems to get ?   When I started, it was really simple !

Dave