Nick_Pyner:
PeterH:
The IDE isn't greatGetting into the Arduino IDE was traumatic enough so I don't think I will change in a hurry, but is the AVR Studio Retro mentions really a better way? Are there better freebie IDEs?
A "better" way? That's subjective. Your code will likely be smaller, faster, and more efficient. But far more complex since you have to do everything yourself like setting up timers and registers, and such. If you use libraries over there, you run into the same issue anyway (though it will still likely be smaller code).
Arduino is great because it is simple and does a ton of work for you and hides all the really scary bits. But you sacrifice on code size. You are trading some things for another. In the end, you can actually just write the same code in the arduino IDE as you can in AVRStudio. Both are using avr-gcc as the compiler. You can access everything directly if you want.