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README for avr1-1.12 (11/2002)

CONTENTS

0. News About This Release

1. Project History - How It All Started
2. How to Build the Binaries
3. Where to Get the Latest Version
4. Misc.

0. News About This Release

Welcome to version 1.12. This version is a clean-up of the v1.11 (beta) release. It should be better than (and able to replace) all earlier versions. Here are some new features and programs:

• The "avrprg" program now uses Data Polling to detect when the next Flash location is ready to be programmed (rather than just waiting a specified number of mS). In addition to speeding up programming, the technique provides verify-after-write for each location as well.
• All of the utilities have a command-line option to slow down the PC-to-AVR interface by lengthening the SCK HIGH and LOW times. This is useful if your parallel port HW is very fast or your AVR is being programmed in-circuit with a slower (<1MHz) clock.
• All of the utilities now attempt to verify that the programming HW is connected to an unlocked and active AVR before trying to do anything.
• The "avreep" and "avreer" programs can now handle AVRs with more than 256 bytes of EEPROM.
• The "avrid" program attempts to identify the AVR by looking up its Signature Bytes in a database of part names and attributes.
• AVR-1 now works with the "ABC Mini Board" produced by Investment Technologies Pty. See the "abc.h" file for details.
• The new "avrcal" program reads the Oscillator Calibration Byte provided by (some?) AVRs that have an internal oscillator.
• The new "avrfr" and "avrfw" programs allow reading and writing, respectively, of the Fuse Bits in the ATtiny1x (and other?) AVRs.
  1. Project History - How It All Started

The AVR-1 Programmer Utilities for Linux is a set of command line tools designed to program the Atmel AVR series of 8 bit RISC microcontrollers. Originally, this package was originally written to control the "AVR-1" programmer manufactured by ITU Technologies, but its usefulness has been expanded thanks to the ingenuity of others.

ITU Technologies is now out of business. See the link below for the full story:

http://www.dontronics.com/itu.html

The programmer sold by ITU was shipped with DOS-based binaries (not open sourced). When I heard what happened to ITU, I realized that there would never be a Linux-native version of their tools. So, I decided to write my own. I didn't know how many AVR-1's were ever sold, or what percentage of those units were bought by people who use Linux. However, I decided to publish my source code with the hope that some other AVR-1 user might benefit from it.

What I didn't realize was that with only minor changes to a couple of source files, the utilities I had written to work with the now-unavailable AVR-1 could be used in conjunction with the Atmel STK-200 programmer dongle. So, with a little help from the Open Source community, my code lives on! (evil genius grin)

2. How to Build the Binaries

(Thanks to Mal Goris (mgoris@csc.com) for helping me with the original Makefile.)

1. Become root.
2. Look in the Makefile and either accept the defaults shown or change them to suit your system / programming hardware.
3. "make"
4. "make install"
5. If you want the man pages: "make man"

The Makefile installs the programs to run as suid root.

3. Where to Get the Latest Version

This package can currently be found at:

http://home.mindspring.com/~phil.ray/avr1/

The file you get will be something like "avr1-x.xx.tar.gz", where the "x"s indicate the version number.

4. Misc.

            Read LICENSE if you are a lawyer. (It's the GPL)
                                - -
          Read BUGS for the latest bugs-- or how to report them.
                                - -
              Read TODO if you need a spare time project. :-)

Good luck, and may all of your AVR projects be successful! Phil Ray
(electron@ieee.org)

EOF: README