We’ve been getting a lot of requests to stock Atmel ATmega328 microcontrollers and they have finally arrived. The ATmega328-PU is the through-hole variety and fits onto our 28 pin AVR Development Board.

The ATmega328 is almost identical to the ATmega168a but has double the Flash, double the EEPROM and double the SRAM.

It can be purchase individually for $5.80 or as part of a development kit for $20.80.

We released the 28 Pin AVR Development Board back in 2008 and since then it has gone through many iterations. This week we release version 1.6 which adds 4 improvements. These improvements were based on customer feedback and we are very grateful for the feedback. Please keep it coming.

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Back in February, we wrote a post on Analogue to Digital Conversion. Many people mentioned that it was a bit light and they would like a more advanced tutorial. Well here it is…

Continue reading “Analogue to Digital Conversion Interrupts on an ATmega168A” »

Sometime last year we ran out of ATmega8 microcontrollers. These became obsolete and were being replaced by the ATmega8A. Unfortunately we have seen huge shortages in AVR microcontrollers over the last 18 months and the new ATmega8A was no different.

Whilst shortages still continue, we have managed to get hold of some ATmega8As in the PDIP package (ATMEGA8A-PU). They are available on their own for $3.90 or as part of a development kit for $18.50. To be fair to everyone we are limiting the purchase of the ATmega8As to a maximum of 5 per order.

EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) Is non-volatile memory, meaning it persists after power is removed. The ATmega168 microcontroller has 512 bytes of EEPROM which can be used to store system parameters and small amounts of data. This tutorial shows you how to read and write EEPROM.
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In this tutorial we will show you how to setup an AVR Eclipse development environment on Windows.
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The AVR family of microcontrollers use a modified Harvard Architecture which uses 3 types of memory, most of which are on chip.
Continue reading “AVR Memory Architecture” »

Version 1.5 of the 28 Pin AVR Development Board is now available. As before we have incorporated a number of changes that people had asked for.

The most notable change is a figure-8 shaped hole for mounting the voltage regulator. This configuration allows for both Input/Ground/Output (IGO) and Ground/Output/Input (GOI) style voltage regulators. Other changes to the power supply include the addition of a diode to protect against reverse polarity and a resettable fuse.
Continue reading “Version 1.5 of AVR 28 pin board” »