Friday 13 April 2007

Atmel AVR Micros - AVR Butterfly

This is the tiny AVR Butterfly I received yesterday - tiny as in smaller than a cassette box!

Its a way into learning about Atmel AVR microprocessors (this is based on the ATMega169 chip). On the little board it has an LCD display, a little joystick (that wart on the right-hand side), temp sensor, speaker for sounds, analogue-to-digital converter and there's meant to be a light dependent resistor but that doesn't seem to be on it (??strange??)

Learning about micros can be a pretty large task (I've been waiting many months to get time to learn about Atmel micros) so I got an intro (e-)book from Smiley Micros - this book is specifically aimed at the Butterfly, but also should give a good understanding of the general use of Atmel chips -- in practice I'd be using chips such as the ATMega16 / ATTiny which are DIL rather than the tiny surface mount ATMega169.

I'll try to keep updating with useful links for learning AVR micros - its an interesting area for synth DIY. There are examples of sound synths using AVRs and also some DSP examples, but my first aim is to use them for control - eg for sequencing.

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