Practical information on how to program the AVR Butterfly kit with a Macintosh.
AvrFasher allows the downloading ("or flashing") of programs to the ATMEL AVR micro-controller family. It has been extensively tested with the "AVR Butterfly" kit* but could also be adapted to other processors. The program is written in JAVA under Xcode (Macintosh OS X development kit*) but the .jar file runs "as is" under LINUX.
The program connects itself through a serial link to the AVR
imbedded serial programmer. For computers (as Macintoshes) lacking
a true serial port, it is necessary to use an USB to Serial converter
to obviate the problem. After having installed the AVR-gcc compiler
and its AVR library, the program can control the compiling and
loading of .hex files by simple menu invocations. (This option
avoids direct typing of cryptic instructions in a terminal window!)
A very simple terminal emulator is also included in AvrFasher
in order to be able to dialog with the micro-controler when needed.
More information are given in the manual.
©Nov. 2005 Henri-Pierre GARNIR (hpgarnir@ulg.ac.be)