AVR-Chat

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 08:52:39PM -0700, Larry Barello wrote:

> It would be redundant to get both the STK500 and the MAVRIC.  The
> STK500 is a development platform & programmer.  The MAVRIC is simply
> a development board with the biggest AVR chip available.

Essentially, correct, but it's a little more than that - MAVRIC
includes a 32K serial I2C eeprom, I2C real time clock, and 128K of
external SRAM on board and a couple of other features (I2C pull-up
resistors, 32KHz RTC Clock crystal on TOSC1&2, etc)..  MAVRIC-II
instead has an RS485 interface and the external memory is optional.
Most boards intended primarily for development boards don't have those
features.

Other than that, I agree with Larry in that if you are going to get
just one, and your primary purpose is for learning, then the STK500 is
the right choice.  Even if you got a MAVRIC / MAVRIC-II, you will
still need a programmer, and unless you make your own you will need to
buy one, such as the STK500 or perhaps the AVRISP.

You really can't go wrong with the STK500.  It is a self contained dev
board that supports all of Atmel's DIP packages.  Especially if you
are just learning, the STK500 is suitable with its builtin switches
and LEDs for experimenting.  And later when maybe you want to move up
to a MAVRIC or MAVRIC-II when you have a more specific application
where one of those boards is suitable, the STK500 still pulls its
weight with it's 10-pin ISP programming header which serves
double-duty as a programmer for my and other third party boards that
have the matching 10-pin ISP header for programming.

> Personally, I recommend the STK500.  It is cheap, flexible and has
> both ISP and parallel programming modes available and can supply
> it's own clock signal.  The latter can be *INVALUABLE* when you
> select innapropriate bits while programming the fuses of the AVR
> chips.  And it handles all flavors of AVR chips - something that
> comes in very handy as your skills grow.

Ditto.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
http://www.bdmicro.com/