An Introduction to Microcontroller Programming for the Hobbyist

This presentation was a basic introduction to microcontrollers in general, and programming the Atmel AVR ATtiny2313 microcontroller. Below are some great resources to help you get started and keep going.

Material From Presentation

The slide show

The PowerPoint presentation shown at the meeting.

Programmer

There are a wide variety of programmers available for AVRs, but here are a few:

USBTinyISP Kit - This is a great DIY AVR USB programmer kit you solder together yourself.

Pocket AVR USB programmer - Based on the USBTinyISP, this programmer is smaller, cheaper, and comes pre-assembled.

Atmel AVR ISP2 - This is a commercial USB programmer sold by Atmel, the makers of the AVR line of microcontrollers.

WinAVR

This handy package for AVR programming containing an editor, compiler, programming software, and a custom Makefile.

Ghetto Programming: Getting started with AVR microprocessors on the cheap.

Ghetto Development Environment

These two instructables are great introductions on getting started with AVR microprocessor programming. The first link shows how to get started building and using a parallel port programmer and describes how a simple blinking LED prorgam works. The second link is by the same user, who describes a slightly more sophisticated setup using a USB programmer and a programming cradle.

Additional Resources

SparkFun

A great all-around site for project ideas and a good selection of some really cool electronics components. Also check out their tutorials for a bunch more information.

LadyAda.net

A list of some great projects with full descriptions and schematics to go with. Some of these projects, like the TV-B-Gone, are even sold as kits by Adafruit Industries.

Make

Great site about projects of all types—not just computing. Subscribe to their RSS feed and get inundated every day with a pile of cool projects that people have done.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Another website with some nifty projects and a store with a handful of kits and a few other things.

DigiKey

Industrial-scale supplier of an amazing number of electronics components.

Mouser

Electronic components supplier similar to DigiKey.

Arduino

An extremely popular, open source, AVR-based platform.

AVR Libc

Documentation for the AVR-specific libraries used by the AVR-gcc compiler.