AVR on a MAC: Blinky success

As a first step, the blinking of an LED is an essential part of development for a new processor and environment. I had read somewhere that the bootloader on an arduino was compatible with an avrisp/STK500 programmer. That turns out to be quite right!

Following the instructions in the getting started guide for the AVR Macpack, I created a new project and entered the following for main.c:

#include 
#include 
int main(void)
{
	DDRB = 0xff;           /* make the LED pin an output */
	for(;;){
		char i;
		for(i = 0; i < 10; i++){
			_delay_ms(10);  /* max is 262.14 ms / F_CPU in MHz */
		}
		PORTB ^= 0xff;    /* toggle the LED */
	}
	return 0;               /* never reached */
}

the Makefile needed a little bit of editing. This just involved the lines near the top describing the device and the programmer:

DEVICE     = atmega168
CLOCK      = 16000000
PROGRAMMER = -c avrisp -F -b 19200 -P /dev/tty.usbserial-A9006L3s

The port is where my iMac found the Arduino USB-serial converter. The baud rate needs to be set to 19,200 for the bootloader and I had to set the -F flag to stop avrdude complaining about the device signature. Presumably, the Arduino bootloader code reports itself differently. If I can find out what that is, it would be worth adding some appropriate lines to the avrdude.conf file. After all that a traditional

make
make flash

and, after a dab at the reset button, we have a blinky light on the board - always a pleasing achievement. Now to haul out some old AVR kit and do some more experiments...