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My First Microchip
- Details
- Category: Electronics and Microchips
- Published on Friday, 16 March 2012 23:47
- Written by Montasser Wahid
- Hits: 98
For years, i have been trying to get into the robotics world, but there was always a set back that held me back, if not the know how, it would be the money, if not the money, it would be time.
I wanted to make a robot, and this robot must have some controller to control it, so I had to use a microchip to do this, but microchips require a special programmer and a special compiler to get some program into it to make it work, there are lots of websites that talk about that, and how to do it, it seamed easy, but I never got to the point where I actually buy a chip.
Few days ago, I read about the AVR microprocessor, by Atmel, a very cool microchip, easy to work with, requires no special programmer to program it, cheap, open source, free IDE, works with the good old C, and so many features that I'm actually not fully familiar with.
I thought why not, let's try it and see what is this all about, so i went to a local electronic components store and asked, they only had 2 chips, the ATMega8515, and the ATMEga8535, i went to another store, i found the ATMega8, ATMega32, ATMega8515, and the ATMEga8535, so i thought OK, lets do it, give me one ATMega8, and one ATMEga8535, and some resistors, capacitors, LED's and a breadboard and went home to try it.
The first target was the famous LED blinker, where you connect an LED to the chip and make it blink, sounds easy, and from there you can go anywhere, I googled some tutorials and I was on, I got an old PC that have an LPT port, and Serial ports, a connector, and followed the tutorials and I got my blinker working!!
I played around with LED, and it was just easy, so now I'm working on my first robot.