Greetings,

While undergoing the studies of electronics, I decided to focus first on the AVR programming. ATMEL AVR microcontrollers such as the ATMEGA328 is a popular chip that is used in the Arudino Uno. The Arduino boards are popular boards that are used with many who first start within the field of electronics. I took many months making projects using the board, however there are ways to create the same projects using simply just the chip. Great thing about the AVR chips are that they can be reprogrammed several times which is great in the development stages of things. In this blog post, I wanted to share four tools used when starting the programming of AVR.

WinAVR consist of suite of open source development tools for the ATMEL AVR series of RISC microprocessors hosted on the Windows operating system. It includes the GNU GCC compiler for C and C++. To download go here: https://winavr.sourceforge.net/.

ATMEL AVR Studio (Microchip Studio) is a free software provided by the ATMEL team. It isn't recommended for new designs and don't support the newer Microchip / ATMEL products. MPLAB IDE is highly recommended from the team which kinda gave me a sign not to download. That's just my opinion. If you still are interested in the software take a moment to visit their site here: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/tools-resources/develop/microchip-studio

AVRDUDE is a cli tool that allows users to program and download the on-chip memory of Atmel's AVR microcontrollers. It can be used to program the EEPROM and flash. You can use this to read / write all chip memory types. To download, visit here:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/avrdude/

The last tool that I will talk about is the PlatformIO extension for VSCode. If you are a developer like I am then we all know about the amazing VSCode IDE. Within the IDE there is an extension called Platform IO that allows users to program AVR and ARM chips. It also supports many types of boards and libraries for your building needs. To learn more about the extension, please visit here: https://platformio.org/install/ide?install=vscode