Comments on: AVR: Programming the EMSL Target Board from Mac OS X

By: bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » Using a Vertical Stack Counter to Debounce Switches

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 06:41:56 +0000

[...] left is a simple EMSL AtmegaXX8 Target Board (same board I have written about before) 3 bit up/down counter [...]

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:47:26 +0000

Usually, the LED will be hooked from VCC [positive] to the chip through the resistor. I’m not fully sure why…

It’s because most microcontrollers can sink more current than they can source. Page 80 of the datasheet for the AVR Tiny12 chip I’m playing with shows the ability to sink up to 50mA, but it can only source 4(!) mA while providing 4.5V of the 5V supply. Pull as much as 16mA from it as a positive output and it drops the voltage to just 2V.

By: bbum

bbum — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:10:56 +0000

Arduino is a terribly useful/cool platform, for what it is. It just happens to not be something I care about in that it is too close to a computer for what I need.

If I were to build, say, something like the Stoker, I would base it on an Arduino so I could have a TCP stack.

By: dave

dave — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:43:07 +0000

Don’t knock Arduino…it’s a nice little widget with a free development environment, written in Java, ready to go. The language is very C like. Forty bucks will get you an Arduino board with microcontroller and away you go. I’ve done dozens of projects on that little board, it’s very useful…and yeah, I use XCode the rest of the time for my other stuff.

By: n[ate]vw

n[ate]vw — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:42:12 +0000

> If you have any interest in screwing around with micro-controllers, there is little excuse not to dive in now.

I still have two AVR microcontrollers (ATMega32?) in my electronics stash from a piezo->MIDI converter I started in high school but lost momentum while at college. Great to know that there is a good toolchain for Mac, but my excuse now is that there are more pressing matters I should be attending to in Xcode. (I must ship.) I’ve bookmarked this, though, in hope of having a chance to return. Maybe when I have kids, I can get them interested in this kind of stuff!