Re: [avr-chat] AVR IDE [WAS: UISP / AVRDude : what to choose ?]

[Brian Dean]

Hi Fred,

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 09:57:04PM -0700, Kingston Co. wrote:

> I also use OS X Tiger and have been using Mac's and many other OS's
> since 1970.  I also have been using XCode 2.2 do develop my code
> that I use on the MAVRIC board I bought from BDmicro about 6-9
> months ago.  The gcc tool chain is very easy to incorporate into
> XCode and use, the only thing I have not figured out is how to get
> the code into the MAVRIC Board from the Mac.  I also have an old
> Win98 box sitting next to my Mac that I can use to download the code
> into the MAVRIC Board.  I still have not been able to get Insight to
> compile on my Mac, some kind of strange configuration problem about
> not recognizing the avr as a valid processor type.  However If I
> knew how to get the code into the MAVRIC and I could get Insight to
> work I would not need the old Win98 box anymore.  Any advice from
> anybody would be very much appreciated.

I use AVRDUDE on MacOS X.  If you've built the AVR toolchain, then
building AVRDUDE should be pretty straightforward for you as well.  I
have a document that describes how to build and install here:

     http://www.bdmicro.com/images/gnuavr.pdf

This describes building these from scratch.

Note that if you use the DarwinPorts mechanism, avr-gcc is available
there along with avrdude (I submitted avrdude a while back and they
added it in short order).  DarwinPorts is a system for building and
installing third party open source tools on the Mac.  It is similar in
concept to the FreeBSD Ports mechanism.  See:

     http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/

Once the DarwinPorts binary is installed, you can simply:

     sudo port install avrdude

That should install avrdude in /opt/local/bin, and it should be ready
to run.

Note that you will need a USB <-> RS232 serial adapter depending on
what programmer you have.  AVRDUDE does not support parallel port
programmers on the Mac because the Mac has no concept of such a
device.  For my STK500 and other flavors of serial port based
programmers, I use a Keyspan USA-19HS to translate between USB and
RS232.  The driver creates a /dev device whose name is based on the
USB hub and port number, something like: /dev/cu.USA19Hb12P1.1.  This
is the name you want to pass to avrdude using the -P option or you can
specify it in the .avrduderc file in your home directory.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/