Starting with AVR Microcontrollers…
So, I have called names to college syllabus and I have ranted about it more times than the number of days I have spent in the college. 
And Now I have decided to stop ranting. Some things never change and this thing is one of them (well of-course, as I said, my long term memory capacity to store such things has been tampered with. So I will not remember this after.. say a week or so and start ranting again 
).
A friend of mine, Kenshin_ (AKA Tushar AKA Meowww) and I were discussing some generic stuff about electronics in the think-digit IRC chatroom. The discussion went from NPN to LSI it was usual talk at first, he was ranting about syllabus, then I chipped in. Next moment I saw that we were talking about his BE project. It is a nice project, a touch screen controlled surveillance vehicle. You can read more about it here.
So, I asked him many questions about the design and other stuff. At last, I took a little liking to the AVR controllers from Atmel. I have been wanting to do something useful for a long time. Not the usual study for exams and go. Sit for exams and write the paper based on whatever little things that had percolated to your brain in those 2 days before exams when you opened the book for the first time and still get a distinction. Not that king of thing. So, I called my friend Nikhil and asked him to get some controllers for me from Pune (Yeah.. Sangli sucks. And I cannot stop ranting ).
I got them around the mid-semester exams. So could not do much with them. I have been reading the datasheets and all the other stuff I found and both Nikhil and Tushar gave me. It looks VERY interesting. I also got a USB programmer from an online shop (sadly, it does not work on Linux even though the site says it does. I have contacted them to provide a driver and a manual to use it with Linux. They are working on it. Nice). Still, even with the mid-semester exams, I could not stop myself from doing ‘kide’ (messing around).
So, I decided to build a binary clock from the code I got from a site. You can see that 60% of the comments on that post are mine. He has written simple instructions about wiring. I had a little problem with he interrupts (debouncing thing) and the time setting switches do not work very well. The clock however works great. Even tested it for 48 hours in a sprint. I am using the internal RC oscillator, so the clock is not precise. It goes into future by 5 minutes every 24 hours.
My first ever controller project (well not first. I did the LED blink and other LED stuff to know more about the code. The interrupt stuff is still not covered though). I am now going back to the books to read up on the rest of the stuff about the controllers….
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under AVR, Design, Electronics, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Kenshin August 31st, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Good start with the AVRs, Finally I converted one more guy into the AVRs muhahahaha..