Re: Atmel AVR development tools



dbvanhorn wrote:

Frustrated, not knowing where to turn with this.

I love the AVR processors. Very clean internally, nice to write code
for.

Nice and fast core but poor set of the peripherals.

But, I am on the edge of dumping them due to severe problems with
their dev tools.

The biggest problem is that Atmel keeps dropping and changing the AVR lines. That makes the AVR unsuitable for the long term projects.

Some people seem to have no trouble with them, but I've been having
problems for years, which are inconsistent, unreproducable, and
totally productivity destroying when they happen.

The problems happen mostly in emulation with their ICE-50, Jtag Ice
(and someone's cheap clone) and with their new MkII jtag ice, as well
as their AVRISP chip programmer.

Why do you need that?

The only tools I ever used for AVR are the scope, the byteblaster and the debug printout to RS-232. I developed the projects of up to about 20k lines of C++ code and the home made RTOS.

Short version, neither they nor I can figure out WTF is going on.

Apparently the problem is with you.

I've seen it, in the past week, 1: Decide that all my code is NOPs in
sim. 2: Ignore CALL or RCALL instructions. 3: Ignore some LDI
instructions, but not all, just specific ones. 4: Totally refuse to
talk to the target chip with Debugwire. And tomorrow, it will
probably be different.

All that said, for months at a time, everything will be fine.
Any ideas?

You have to stop playing games with the fancy toys and content yourself with the essential.
The entities should not be multiplied beyond the necessity.


Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
http://www.abvolt.com
.