Atmel AVR microcontroller

Introduction

After my first microcontroller projects with the Motorola 68HC11, I was looking for a newer, cheaper microcontroller with a larger program memory. Furthermore, I was not keen on programming everything in assembler.
So there were basically only two choices: The Microchip PIC or the Atmel AVR. Since the GNU C compiler those days compile code for the AVR microcontrollers (but not for the PIC), I decided against the PIC and for the AVR.
If the ARM were that popular and cheap as it is today, I might have chosen something like the STM32 right then.

Development tools and software

• A special variant is the Arduino, a good choice for beginners
• Two different AVR programmers (one for the parallel port, one for USB)
• Some code snippets

Toolchain

For a toolchain, you need the packages avr-binutils, avr-gcc, avr-libc and avrdude (for programming)