AVR-Chat

On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 11:52:18AM -0500, Dave VanHorn wrote:

> >Seriously, that sounds awful.  How are major projects developed
> >with AVR if the tools couse this much pain ?

> That is a question I have asked myself a lot, over the last couple
> years.  My experience with studio 3.2-ish, and the ICE-200 was
> absolutely stellar.

Come on over to the dark side, Dave - FreeBSD.

Find a spare system and load up the latest FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE
Download that from here:

	http://www.freebsd.org/

To install avr-gcc:

	cd /usr/ports/devel/avr-gcc && make install

To install avrdude:

	cd /usr/ports/devel/avrdude && make install

To install avarice:

	cd /usr/ports/devel/avarice && make install

To install avr-gdb;

	cd /usr/ports/devel/avr-gdb && make install

To install a pretty good simulator:

	cd /usr/ports/devel/simulavr && make install

No fuss.

Grab a JTAGICE and a manual on the GNU Debugger (assuming you are new
at that) and you're good to go.

Also, I get the feeling you're an assembler person - the GNU assembler
works fine with the AVR including native assembler macro support, or
if you choose, you can preprocess the assembler files with the C
preprocessor and use C #defines and macros instead or in addition to.

Unfortunately, since the Atmel ICE products like the ICE-200 are
closed spec, there are no open source tools that can use them, to the
best of my knowledge.  That may be a show stopper for you.  But the
JTAGICE works well in combination with avarice and gdb, at least I
haven't had any problems with it at all.  I just used it the other day
to track down a particularly elusive memory overwrite bug.  I usually
only pull out the JTAGICE when debugging with printf() or tracking
program progress and state via carefully placed port pin changes and
monitoring with a scope fails to produce the desired results.  And
everytime I use the JTAGICE, I ask myself, "why don't I use this more
- it works great?".

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean, bsd@bdmicro.com
BDMICRO - Maker of the MAVRIC ATmega128 Dev Board
http://www.bdmicro.com/