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Having programmed microcontrollers for many years, we have become regular users of development boards. There are many available on the market. Some expensive ones attempt to achieve universality by handling many different MCU models and including many different peripherals on-board. Others are nothing more than a »break-out« board for a specific MCU device.
In contrast, we have designed optimal development boards, that will meet most of your requirements while writing/testing your AVR programs. These boards emerged from extensive usage in our daily work, so there are very good reasons why our tools are designed as illustrated in this chapter.
Use smart tools when writing your Bascom-AVR programs!
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Written by Jurij Mikeln
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 MiniPin II is a smaller brother of MegaPin. Smaller, but still very user friendly and versatile development board, where programs for AVRs may be tested and evaluated. Connecting your programmer to the MiniPin II board.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:41 |
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Written by Jurij Mikeln
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 Proggy-AVR has been very popular for the last five years or so. It had a nice blue enclosure which made it attractive and distinctive from other programmers (that often had no enclosure at all). Now we are making a renovated, faster AVR programmer that is both less expensive and smaller. No wonder we expect it to be well accepted within the AVR programmer’s community.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 19 February 2015 11:52 |
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Written by Vladimir Mitrović
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 Have you ever wondered what your program looks like when Bascom-AVR translates it into a form understandable to a microcontroller? Well, it’s not difficult to find out - just open the .hex file of your program and look at these sequences of hexadecimal numbers. They seem quite obscure, don’t they? It is hard to believe that these “random strings of numbers” could mean anything to anybody... But no, they are not random, and yes, they make a microcontroller act in just the way you have foreseen in your program!
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:45 |
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Written by Bojan Kovač
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 The abbreviation UART stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. It is a serial data interface with a defined speed. Regardless of the actual voltage level of the RS232 signals, these RS232/RS482 devices present signals to the microcontroller as a logical 0 or 1.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:46 |
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Written by Jurij Mikeln
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 MegaPin is a modern development board built upon the experience of many microcontroller programmers. It’s user-friendly, very compact and yet offers many possibilities in developing microcontroller programs.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:42 |
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Written by Jurij Mikeln
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 Debugging is a procedure, where we trace program flow with the help of suitable software and/or hardware. While tracing program flow, we can find annoying “bugs” inside our program. If we do not have suitable debugging hardware we can use a simulator, like the one included in Bascom-AVR. We can also find problems by displaying some “debugging data” on an LCD display or in a terminal window, if we send data out to the RS232 or USB port. I will show you how you can debug Bascom programs with a help of the AVR Studio 4 program and the MegaPin development board.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:45 |
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Written by Vladimir Mitrović
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We usually use ISP programmers for AVR microcontrollers because they offer all the functions that an ordinary user needs. However, there are situations in which such programmers are not helpful: for example, if Serial programming enable fuse (SPIEN) is disabled or if External reset disable fuse (RSTDISBL) is programmed. Although you cannot disable SPIEN in serial programming mode yourself, you may affect some other fuses and disable further serial programming. After that, you may throw the microcontroller away... or use this simple and low-cost parallel and serial high-voltage programmer that will revive it in a minute.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:46 |
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Written by Jurij Mikeln
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 Many years ago there were problems obtaining LCD modules. If you were lucky enough to buy a certain module at a reasonable price, you could be disappointed few months later when you couldn’t buy the same or even a compatible LCD module. What was offered might have a different pinout, not to mention different physical dimensions.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 14:48 |
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