AVR-Chat

--- In AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com, Eric <erichards@c...> wrote:

> Does anybody know about the
> Atmel AVR ® STK500 ...

This is the "classic" way to begin with Atmel AVR MCUs. If the $80 
price tag is acceptable to you, I'd recommend it. You get serial and 
parallel programming capability for all the mid- and low-end AVRs, 
some lights and switches, etc. You will need a power source, which is 
not supplied, and a PC to host AVR Studio, which is. If you want to 
program in C, you will need to get a compiler from somewhere.  WinAVR 
is free, but takes a little getting used to if you are a Windows IDE 
person.

However, it does not support high-end AVRs such as the ATmega64 nor 
the ATmega169, etc. These require add-ons which cost another $80 or 
more. Nor does the STK500 have a JTAG interface for on-chip debug of 
the ATmega16 or ATmega32.

You can add JTAG support to the STK500 with a simple adapter. I sell 
such an adapter with my AVR ICE-Cube JTAG interface, see my Web site. 
This will give you on-chip debug using the ATmega16 or ATmega32 in 
the STK500.

There are non-Atmel starter kits for the AVR, but you should make 
sure you have everything you need when weighing the cost.  One other 
way to start is with an Atmel AVR Butterfly, my Butterfly Carrier and 
an ICE-Cube.  This will also total about $80. You get only one MCU, 
the ATmega169, but on the Butterfly it has a display, photocell, 
thermistor, speaker, external flash memory, etc. which is all good 
stuff for experimenting. You also get on-chip debug so you can see 
your software interact with the hardware.

People could give you more advice if you told us what you are 
planning to do.

Graham.
http://www.ecrostech.com