How To Program Microcontroller Atmel
Atmel® AVR® 8- and 32-bit microcontrollers deliver a unique combination of performance, power efficiency, and design flexibility. Optimized to speed time to market, they are based on the industry's most code-efficient architecture for C and assembly programming. No other microcontrollers deliver more computing. Atmel is one of the few silicon manufacturers that offers all the software tools required to work with their microcontrollers free of charge ( and with no restrictions).
ATMEGA microcontrollers like the one in the arduino that are coming straight from the factory can only be programmed using the SPI or JTAG interface. Stands for Serial Peripheral Interface and is a way for microcontrollers to communicate with each other or with the outside world. It's also called 3-wire sometimes because it uses three wires to communicate. To program a chip, you will need a special programmer which reads commands from USB to drive the SPI lines to program the chip. A popular one seems to be the. A very good introduction into SPI programming is. The most popular applications for programming Atmel AVR chips are avrdude (cmd line), ponyprog (doesn't work with newer programmers) and in some cases AVR Studio (if your programmer supports it).
The advantage of SPI programming is that you can program any Atmel chip straight from the factory so you wouldn't always need an Arduino in your projects. Where SPI is 'just another' serial protocol, is a protocol which is especially designed to program and debug microcontrollers. Not all Atmel micro's support JTAG but the ones that are used in the Arduino do. The JTAG protocol can be used for cool things like 'in circuit emulation' and debugging which means that it enables you to see the state of the program in your microcontroller while it's actually running. To do this you'll need a special programmer. Seen my answer for.
To program a chip using USB, you'll have to program it first with a 'bootloader' using SPI or JTAG. Once loaded with the bootloader, the system will be programmable from any PC using a USB-Serial converter. The downside is that the bootloader takes up some memory space and this method does not allow you to see the state of the chip while it's running. While accurate in the idea that a serial bootloader isn't available on a new ATMEGA (though it is on many other microcontrollers), the claim that SPI or JTAG must be used is incorrect. ATMEGAs also support a high voltage parallel programming mode, which has the ability to over-ride some fuse settings that would make the more popular in-circuit-programming methods unworkable. JTAG was not designed for programming micros but for testing PC boards by clocking values into and out of IO pin registers.
Extending it for programming or debugging core functions was a later hack. Valkyrie Profile Patch From 101. – Dec 29 '10 at 5:43 •. While I would love to dive into the various programming methods available, someone else already has. Here is Dean Camera's tutorial on AVRFreaks,: There are many ways to program AVR microcontrollers. Since many people ask about different ones at one time or another, I thought I'd outline them here so that their questions can be answered quickly and efficiently. Please forgive me if I miss a method or make an error. METHOD 1: In System Programming (ISP) Supported By: Vast majority of AVRs (see below posts) Supported Programmers: AVRISP MKI/II, JTAG MKII, STK500, STK600, Dragon, AVRISP clones, AVR910 Programmers, AVRONE In System Programming is perhaps the most common method of programming the flash, EEPROM, fuse and lockbytes of the entire AVR line.