It should be no surprise that, thanks to the Auduino platform, I reach for an AVR microcontroller first…at least for any project where an ARM SoC isn’t what I’m after.  Part of the success of both the AVR and the Arduino platform (which is based on the AVR) is the proliferation of tools.  When you’re working on a microcontroller, you’re flying with one propellor and not much else.  In fact, in any good embedded development shop, you’ll find at least one tools specialist whose full time (or nearly full-time job) is to cobble together the toolkit for the other engineers.  This person’s bread and butter is keeping everyone else from flying blind.

Suffice it to say, I love a good tool, and this could be one of the best I’ve seen in a long time…AVRSH, a command line and shell that directly exposes the features of an AVR.  Register manipulation, pin configs, fuses…it’s all in there, and you can interact with them using a very familiar interactive shell.  This is useful for two major reasons.  The first is for those times when you need to poke around and scope out how a chip feature really works.  Traditionally, I attack this by making a “dummy load” program and either single-stepping through it with debugger or watching the fireworks through JTAG.  If neither are available, I make the program have some long timing in it and I start attaching an oscope or LEDs to watch the state of lines.  This works, but it’s a crude process that’s infinitely improved by letting me more freely interact with the chip’s features myself.

The other way AVRSH is awesome is in general proptyping of a concept.  Because the only way to know if your program works is to build it, program your board with it, and watch the results, there’s an endless treadmill involved in early prototyping.  An interactive shell greatly improves this scenario, especially if you’re engaged in HW/SW co-design and need to watch how changes at one level impact another.

This is, effectively, the difference between exploring a cave by throwing wireless cameras in random directions and watching the video produced…and exploring a cave by picking up a flashlight and going for a stroll.

Make this a great scripting environment and basic embedded systems programming just became a first-class part of the Linux apps programming world.  With AVRs making such great controllers for robotic activities, how long before “Begone or I’ll replace you with 10 lines of Perl” really becomes true?

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My wife, the ever-wonderful Amy Hale, gave me a wonderful Christmas gift.  I now have an Arduino Duemilanove, an XPort shield kit, and a LED art kit.  Of course, the first thing I’ve considered is doing some web data-driven light art, so I just need to figure out what data I want to capture and visualize.  That’s the beauty of Arduino systems…everything is simple, componentized, and ready to use.  The high level language used to program the platform, Processing, really leaves you asking questions about the application of the platform instead of the implementation.  I don’t believe it’s the best way in the world to learn about the design of an embedded system, but for getting something done, it’s a system which is hard to beat.

A note to prospective gift buyers, though.  The XPort shield kit is just the platform for an Ethernet module but it is not an Ethernet module on its own.  The supplier may be offering the module as part of an extended kit, but the build instructions at Make suggest buying an XPort which will cost an additional $30 or so (after shipping, etc).  So, just remember this if you want to make the gift all-inclusive.

The other great thing is that now I have an Arduino, which I was actually planning on using to make a touch-screen prototype at work.  Again, the focus on componentization and a high-level programming environment makes this a good platform for quick prototyping.  When you can buy a TouchShield, drop it on the shield connector, and grab an extra Processing library and start looking at your prototype application…well, that’s a rapid prototyping dream.

I’ve been doing more part sourcing research on my completely made-from-scratch platform.  I’ll post about that separately.