AVR STUDIO vs ARDUINO

Hi all

I am new to AVR micros , my question is this :

What is the advantage of ARDUINO vs ATMEL AVR STUDIO ?

I am asking this because AVR STUDIO deals with ALL AVR chips, vs ARDUINO
that deals with several AVRs .

Thanks
Elico

Well... in order to make your choice, you need to do some more research on what Arduino is vis-a-vis what you want to achieve

Arduino incorporates -
a. A self-contained reference circuit & board that simplifies power, communications & connections for the ATMEGA chip
b. A bootloader sitting on the ATMEGA chip that makes it easy to program through a USB connection via a peripheral chip
c. A bunch of libraries sitting on top of the AVR LibC
d. The IDE itself, which has a reasonable front-end & simplifies make/upload signficantly

Arduino platform basically makes it simple to go ahead & hack away at what you want to do with your circuit vs. being caught up in the technicalities of using a micro-processor itself - simplifying life for people new to micro-controllers & also providing a fast prototyping platform for the more experienced folks before they move a complex project to a more "production" setting.

AVR studio on the other hand is basically an IDE (sitting over Microsoft Visual Studio's front-end - so more "programming focussed" features) focused on programming the ATMEGA sitting directly on top of AVR LibC - you're on you own from the hardware front - but is possibly the choice you'd make if you're playing in a production setting.

And if you want to play in the middle, it's possible to use AVR Studio, Microsoft Visual C++ or Eclipse for Arduino development too... look @ the Development Tools section in Arduino Playground

Thanks
Elico

Hi,
I would suggest go with Arduino first, I installed AVR Studio last night having used Arduino for three months. I haven't got any code onto a chip yet with AVR Studio but can already see there are many more configurations I will need to work through before I do. With Arduino it was pretty much plug and play.

The Arduino libraries also give a nice introduction to the underlying hardware, for example if you read through the source code of the Servo library you will learn a lot about the interrupts and timers. This is all knowledge that you can carry over to AVRStudio as and when you decide to.

Duane.

rcarduino.blogspot.com