Wednesday, October 8, 2008

AVR Studio and WinAVR as C teaching tools...

AVR Studio when run in combination with WinAVR (packaging avr gcc, avr-libc and all the other gubbins) provides an awesome 1st learning environment for people learning C for the first time
  • Completely free, for students and staff
  • Traffic light graphical message highlights: Green spots next to messages when things went right, yellow for warnings and red for errors. Instantly understandable!
  • Graphical indication of the current location in the program with autostep to move step by step through the program - outlines the flow immediately.
  • Processor window showing the program counter, cycle counter (how much time has your program taken?). Turning ints to floats added 4000 cycles to a simple test program.
  • Internal processor registers very visible
  • I/O View graphically highlights ports and pins with a row of 8 squares which are filled when the bit is set. Instant graphical Hex to Binary
I really think that this is an ideal learning environment, not too big and not too small.

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