Announcing the ATMEGA1284 Development Kit

March 2, 2014 New Products 0 Comment

The ATMega1284 is an impressive microcontroller with plenty of memory, plenty of pins and loaded with features. The ATMEGA1284 Development Kit combines the microcontroller with our 40 Pin AVR Development Board and a bunch of other components to help you build ATMega1284 circuits faster. The kit is nearly identical to the one that Tweak Town...

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ATMega1284 and Resistor Networks

January 24, 2014 New Products 0 Comment

We've been selling many different AVR microcontrollers for some time. This week we add the ATMEGA1284 to our lineup. The ATMEGA1284 is quite impressive with 128K of flash and 16K of RAM. It comes in a 40 pin through-hole PDIP package, has the same general pinout as the ATMEGA32A but runs faster and has more...

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USBASP Windows Driver Version 1.2.6

November 27, 2013 Announcements 0 Comment

The USBASP windows driver is based on libusb-win32. A while back they released version 1.2.6 and this has now been packaged up for the USBASP. The download link is below: https://protostack.com.au/download/USBasp-win-driver-x86-x64-ia64-v1.2.6.zip This driver should work with version of Windows, XP and higher (both 32 and 64 bit editions).

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Introducing the 40 pin AVR Development Board

June 2, 2013 New Products 0 Comment

We are please to announce our newest product, the 40 pin AVR Development Board. This board is similar in concept to the 28 pin AVR Development Board, except that... well it has more pins. More specifically it works with 40 pin AVR Microcontrollers like the ATMega32A This board conforms to the full size protostack form...

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Just In, 3 new ICs for March

March 24, 2013 New Products 1 Comment

3 new products this month, all ICs this time. Have you ever wished you could control a pot using a microcontroller? Well you could connect a stepper motor to one, on or maybe use on of these. The Maxim MCP4131 is a digital potentiometer that can be set using an SPI interface. With a 7...

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ATmega328 now available

September 7, 2011 New Products 0 Comment

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...

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28 Pin AVR Development Board – Version 1.6

April 17, 2011 Announcements 0 Comment

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. What has changed? The size of...

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Analogue to Digital Conversion Interrupts on an ATmega168A

April 3, 2011 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 4 Comments

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... In this tutorial we add a second analogue input and use the ADC Conversion Complete interrupt. The circuit we are using is...

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Analogue to Digital Conversion on an ATmega168

February 13, 2011 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 18 Comments

Many AVR microcontrollers are capable of doing Analogue to Digital Conversion. The ATmega168 has 6 ports (8 ports on the SMD packages) that can be used for analogue input. This tutorial shows you how. The circuit We'll be building the following circuit on a breadboard. The Breadboard layout is based on the Atmega8 breadboard circuit...

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ATmega8A Microcontrollers in Stock

January 21, 2011 New Products 0 Comment

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...

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Reading and writing Atmega168 EEPROM

January 9, 2011 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 3 Comments

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. Overview Our code examples will be very...

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AVR Eclipse Environment on Windows

December 29, 2010 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 13 Comments

In this tutorial we will show you how to setup an AVR Eclipse development environment on Windows. Installing the AVR-GCC toolchain The AVR-GCC toolchain is a collection of tools which are used to compile and upload firmware to AVR microcontrollers. The toolchain comprises of: GCC - The C/C++ Compiler GNU Binutils - A collection of...

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AVR Memory Architecture

December 23, 2010 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 0 Comment

The AVR family of microcontrollers use a modified Harvard Architecture which uses 3 types of memory, most of which are on chip. Flash RAM EEPROM Flash Flash is non volatile memory, which means it perisists when power is removed. Its purpose is to hold intructions that the microcontroller executes. The amount of flash can range...

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Version 1.5 of AVR 28 pin board

July 30, 2010 Announcements 0 Comment

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...

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ATmega8 breadboard circuit – Part 3 of 3 – The Firmware

August 12, 2009 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 25 Comments

This tutorial continues on from ATmega8 breadboard circuit Part 1 and ATmega8 breadboard circuit Part 2. So far we've built a power supply, added the microcontroller, added some plumbing to make it work and added the ISP interface, but it really doesn't do anything. The next step is to add some I/O devices and upload...

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ATmega8 breadboard circuit – Part 2 of 3 – The Microcontroller

July 26, 2009 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 23 Comments

This tutorial continues on from ATmega8 Breadboard Circuit - Part 1 where we build a small power supply on the breadboard. In this part we will add the ATmega8 microcontroller and an interface to allow it to be programmed. The first step is to orient yourself with the ATMEGA8 microcontroller. Since we are building our...

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Atmega8 breadboard circuit – Part 1 of 3 – Power supply

July 20, 2009 AVR Microcontrollers, Tutorials 3 Comments

This is the 1st of a 3 part series where I will describe how to build a basic ATmega8 circuit and program it with a simple program. This tutorial is ideal for first timers, so read on... Breadboards usually have a break or two in the bus strips, so the first thing we will do...

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