Re: [avr-chat] Avrdude and JTAG / Dragon...

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Mon, 2 Mar 2009 09:44:05 -0500
David VanHorn <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Actually the program so far is only 10KB. But it takes like 2 seconds
> > to write, another 2 seconds to read back/verify, so that's 4/5
> > seconds ! ;-
> 
> OMG!  :)  Remember the days of Eproms?  15 minutes to erase, 5-10 to 
> program...

Yes, I am only 31 year old but I vividly remember that... and I am NOT
regretting them ! ;-)

When I did my industrial placement in 1999/2000, I spent the first few
months developping on a PIC 17C something, which stored its program in
EPROM ! So for every 10 seconds I spent doing a quick modification to
the program, I had to spend 10 minutes to erase the PIC !
And go figure, every time it seemed it needed longer to be erased
properly ! At firt 5 minutes seemed enough, then after some erase
cycles, some areas of the memory didn't read FF's, so I had to put it
again for a few minutes. I think after a few months (and countless 
erase cycles), the bloody things needed 20 minutes to be reliably
cleared ! :-/
Thank God, after that, my boss moved to a 16Fxxx chip which had Flash,
PHEW !!! :-) Needless to say I was rather happy...

At school in 1997 I learned MCU on an 8051 (well, a 80C552), so the
program was n external memory, EPROM again then. Luckily, we had a
development board to learn so the EPROM only stored the monitor... the
user program was downloaded to the external RAM, phew.

So when I discovered these AVR chips a few years back, I couldn't
believe how much features and convenience it packed for such a low
price ! It was like heaven.. seemd it had nothing but goodness to
offer ! :-) The on-board JTAG debugging simply blew me away... I just
couldn't believe a cheap 8 bit chip could have that buit-in !
I am not looking back... long live AVR's and modern 8 bit MCU's in
general ! :-)

--
Vince