The Eclectic Technologist

I really like Atmel AVR microcontrollers. They are simple, powerful, and inexpensive. There are lots of development tools out there, but I like AVR Studio. AVR Studio is made for Windows, but it works great inside Parallels desktop on my iMac. Parallels sees the AVRISP mkII USB programmer also. I had no problem upgrading firmware on the programmer. Now that I have a nice development environment set up, I might be able to finish some of the numerous hardware projects that have been languishing for years.

One minor problem I ran into was the clock rate on the ATtiny24. By default, the clock is divided by 8, so it runs at about 1 MHz using the internal RC clock. This was too slow for the default program clock, which caused programming errors. This is to be expected, but it ends up crashing Windows! After testing on a native Windows machine, I located the problem, reduced the programming clock and disabled the clock divider fuse. After that, everything was smooth. I even got AVR-GCC working using WinAVR.
I’ll post some of the circuits I’ve been working on in the coming months.

Electronic Design recently published my article on squegging and how to avoid it. I learned about its publication last week when a reader recognized my name from the first book I wrote in 1996.