Atmel Studio by Atmel Corporation is a piece of software that was designed to help users develop applications for Atmel microcontrollers (ARM and AVR). Atmel Studio for Mac cannot be found, so you are free to try some of the alternative tools for programming microcontrollers. Once imported, you can leverage the full capabilities of Studio 7 to fine-tune and debug your design. Atmel Studio 7 fully supports the powerful embedded debugger on the Arduino Zero board.
for AVR® Development
CrossPack is a development environment for Atmel’s AVR® microcontrollers running on Apple’s Mac OS X, similar to AVR Studio on Windows. It consists of the GNU compiler suite, a C library for the AVR, the AVRDUDE uploader and several other useful tools.
Features
- Does not depend on Xcode for building AVR code.
- Runs on Mac OS X 10.6 and higher.
- Supports 8 bit AVR microcontrollers including XMEGA devices.
- Includes patches to gcc for new devices not yet supported by gcc's main distribution.
- Includes gdb for debugging with simulavr and avarice.
- You can create your own version of CrossPack AVR based on the build script available on github.com.
For a list of included software packages and versions see the Release Notes.
Getting Started
Since CrossPack consists of command line tools only (except the HTML manual which is linked to your Applications folder), you need to know some basic command names. So let’s demonstrate CrossPack with a trivial project, a blinking LED implemented on an ATMega8. This project is described in more detail in CrossPack’s manual.
The command avr-project creates a minimum firmware project which is configured for an ATMega8 with internal RC oscillator at 8 MHz. Now we have something to start with. We edit main.c and implement the blinking loop:
Now we compile the code and send it to the device:
That’s it. The LED should now blink. For a real project you should also edit Makefile to configure your uploader hardware (e.g. STK500, USBasp, AVR-Doper or similar), other source code modules, fuse options etc.
Is Atmel Studio compatible with Mac or Linux?
It seems like there is only Windows support from the downlaods here: http://www.microchip.com/mplab/avr-support/atmel-studio-7.
2 Answers
$begingroup$No, recent versions of Atmel studio are based on Visual Studio which is Windows only.
Cross Pack
You could run it in a virtual machine.
But it's worth noting that Atmel studio uses avr-gcc and arm-none-eabi-gcc (and presumably an avr32 gcc) to do the actual compilation, all of which are available for other platforms. As are downloading tools for their bootloaders, and ISP and SWD/JTAG tools like avrdude, OpenOCD, etc.
Also the Atmel Software Framework of chip-specific source code libraries is available as a huge zip file download independent of Atmel studio.
GDB works well with an SWD adapter for Atmel's ARM parts, there are some indications it can be made to work with the AVRs connected via an Atmel ICE, but never personally tried that.
So unless you want to use a setup that's unique to Atmel parts, you can readily target their parts using your favorite work environment running on top of your favorite operating system.
Chris StrattonChris StrattonLater 4.x versions seem to work in wine, but most people programming for AVR µCs on Linux don't use Atmel Studio anyway but command line avr-gcc, Makefiles and a decent text editor. (Or eclipse.)
JankaJanka