AVR GCC - Questions

[LXE]

I have a few questions about AVR GCC and the AVR chips -

• Can I use the Arduino or any other "non-official AVR programmers" as an ISP with the AVR GCC?
• Are there any good free software and tools available?
• Are there any good sources of information to learn how to program in "C"?
• What AVR chips can you program with the AVR GCC? Can it program an AVR ARM microcontroller?
• What chips do you reccommend for programming?
• Should I stick with the Arduino or should I move to AVR GCC now or in the near future?

[Webbot]

The avr-gcc toolchain covers the ATTiny, ATMega and ATXMega chips - not the ARM.

As for programmers then thats nothing to do with a compiler. The programmer just uploads a file - it doesn't care what compiler you used to create the file.

[amando96]

I'm using the arduino to program an attiny26 right now, it acts as an stk500v1 and works perfectly, should program all the AVRs.

>Go here for more, you would have to change some things depending on what chip you have, but avr dude's error messages tend to be clear.

The arduino itself is really powerful, which can be overkill for some projects, so it's not a bad idea to have a few attinys around, the arduino can be a programmer one minute  and a prototyping platform in the next