Atmel has announced their AVR Xplained series of dev boards.
Atmel AVR Xplained is a series small-sized and easy-to-use evaluation kits for 8- and 32-bit AVR microcontrollers. It consists of a series of low cost MCU boards for evaluation and demonstration of feature and capabilities of different AVR familie. Example projects and code drivers are provided in AVR Studio 5. Code functionality is easily added by pulling in additional drivers and libraries from the AVR Software Framework.
The AVR Xplained series also consists of a range of add-on boards that can be stacked on the MCU boards to create platforms for specific application development. A wide range of add-on boards is available, including, intertial pressure and temperature sensors, ZigBee RF, and Cryptographic authentication.
List price for MCU boards is around $30, with sensor modules between $25-54.
Details on features and availability are available from Atmel.
These boards look pretty good. They’re not stripped-bare boards but do have a sensor or two, input (e.g., Q-touch),and thoughtful footprints for some interesting peripherals. But at $30 each – I dunno… I’d probably build my own PDQ instead.
What ATMEL needs to do is bundle a tiny bare-bones ATtiny demo board for free with the AVR Dragon programmer/debugger – which is vastly misunderstood and poorly marketed.
The Dragon is a corner-stone to affordable yet productive development with many of ATMEL’s parts, and it only costs $49. But everyone still seems to blindly buy the somewhat cheaper yet horrific third party programmers, like the stuff from Adafruit.
C’mon ATMEL, you’ve already done us right by not crippling your development tools and removing the idiotic “fake” memory limit barrier in the Dragon. Now learn how to unleash Dragon!
No, I don’t work for ATMEL…
As I recall, the Dragon has a really bad reptuation for reliability. A lot of users seem to find it dies on them after a few months or a year.
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@makomk, The key word in your remark is “had” a bad reputation.
The early production versions of the Dragon had some sort of problem with the level shifters (working from memory here) that caused some to kick the bucket if handled harshly. This was rectified in the following run. The chance of your getting one of these very early version Dragons is next to zero (buy from Digi-Key or Mouser). Unfortunately, the early Dragon failures have followed the thing like a bad hang-over, undoubtedly helped along by PIC fan-boys.
I’ve done some pretty horrible things to my Dragon, especially when using it in-circuit with targets at a different voltage (yes, the Dragon adapts). I surely expected to wipe it out – but no, it lives on.
With later version of AVR Studio 4.x, ATMEL wised up and removed the artificial memory size cap in the Dragon firmware (If you let it, AVR Studio injects new firmware into the Dragon via a bootloader). I’m sure some Marketing Goon is pissed about this – but it was the right thing to do. Everyone knew it was a Marketing gimmick, and it was only a question of time before someone rooted it anyway.
JTAG, ISP, HVSP, ICDebug, you can even run the target on the Dragon itself. Great tool at the right price IMO.
Remember to read the manual first. The Dragon is quite flexible, understand the hardware and jumper process before you buy. The DIP sockets are in parallel. Then, if you don’t have them in your junk box, buy two DIP sockets, a few 0.1″ breakaway header strips and some jumper wires when you buy your Dragon.
Atmel should do a better job to Dragon. Check out the fully functional debug adapter from Silicon Laboratory (for C8051, http://www.silabs.com). That debug adapter costs only $35 and works really well. I don’t understand why Atmel’s debuggers (Dragon and JTAGICE mkII) are packaged so poorly. I dislike the cable and connector on both the Dragon and JTAGICE mkII.