Microcontroller issues

[cjwillms]

Well, I finally got in everything I needed to experiment with, but I must say that my microcontroller was driving me insane. From what I read, you didn't need a programmer since it was built into my AVR (ATMega32). So, I hooked everything thing up, followed the directions on a site about hooking up the cable, and sure enough it didn't work. I spent 4 days, looking through about 30 articles, to no avail. Today, I finally got it to work.

I don't know why, but everyone has seemed to completely phase out parallel cable support. The only thing that really helped me was a program called AVRDude. From what I can tell, it's the ONLY programming software that supports Direct AVR Parallel Access. I still had to browse through its configuration file to actually find what pins need to be connected, but it does work now.

I'm actually rather surprised that articles about this stuff are nearly non existent. I’m starting to wonder if this is caused by the lack of interest in this filed, or if it’s caused by the electronic manufactures to force you to spend a extra 60 USD for a programmer you don’t need.

[Admin]

Yea I tried using atmel microcontrollers too, and I got things to work with it . . . but what really annoyed me, as with you, is total lack of online documentation.

I really struggled to get even the most basic stuff to work because there was just no support, no sample code, and no easy to follow documentation.

I encourage you to post your atmega source code on this forum when you get things working. Don't forget to put lotsa comments in it!

[cjwillms]

I probably will do that. As of right now, I can only do basic stuff in assembly as well. I'm going to try to figure out how to use the timer when I get home, but there isn't any documentation on this as well. I may just have to loop a statement x number of times, in order to create delays between the code.