Video: Learning To Program For The ATmega328p Part I

Many of you are familiar with the Arduino. Many of you hate it…* This post isn’t about the Arduino. It is about the processor that is at the heart of many Arduino boards. If you are in the camp of people who can’t understand why others dislike the Arduino so much, this series is for you. In this series of videos, [Jack] will explore how to program for the ATmega328p processor using C. If you have been programming for the Arduino, you may have had some issues with the speed of your code at points. Programming in C will allow you to wring out nearly the last ounce of processing power that the ATmega processors can provide. It will also let you access the peripherals on the processor directly and to switch between different processors when you need more (or less) capabilities.

In this first video, [Jack] shows you all of the features of the 3pi robot, which he will be using as a fancy development board for the ATmega328p. He then shows you how to get your development environment set up and then walks you through one of the sample programs provided for the 3pi robot.

*Here at Hackaday, we are officially neutral in the ongoing Arduino love/hate war. We don’t care what microcontroller is used in the hacks that we show, only that they are cool.

Video is after the break!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzCnNKQGm9Y&w470]

14 thoughts on “Video: Learning To Program For The ATmega328p Part I

  1. I program my Arduino board using avr-gcc and writing in C. It takes a little more time but you really learn what you are doing, altought I understand why somebody not that technically oriented would choose the whole arduino environment. I like the bootloader and having a MCU board that Just Works(tm) to start rapidly prototyping, but don’t like depending on a mess of libraries that make things slow :)

  2. I really like the new videos. Keep it up! They are fantastic.

    I guess I would have liked to seen you start off with a more “generic” approach….but that’s just me.

    1. I have to agree there; not only does the robot cost a lot, but it locks you into a format that prevents the use of some of the chip features…when this was announced I expected someone with a digital still cam, a breadboard, and a pile of various bits and pieces so that various common Arduino projects could be shown using non-Arduino libraries.

      I’m not saying the video wasn’t good…I just think this was overhyped a little.

  3. Yeah, I, too, was expecting something a little more…general.

    The robot is nice and all, but I got excited when I first heard about the C programming series because I’m an arduino fan and am just taking a course on C, so it’s the perfect time for me to apply it. This isn’t really what I was looking forward too.

    Hopefully the next videos will be a little more informational as far as how these chips are programmed raw.

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