Saturday, June 25, 2016

Using Arduino Libraries in Atmel Studio

Atmel Studio 6 is one of the best IDE's available for AVR Series of Micro-Controller. Released in 2011 and based on Microsoft Visual Studio, Studio 5 was a large change from AVR Studio 4, which was based on the tried and true Eclipse IDE. Studio 4 is seriously showing its age these days, so a refresh was welcome. However, version 5 came with a long list of bugs and didn’t deliver on a lot of the feature list, which left a lot of people wondering whether they should upgrade. The new version appears to have addressed a lot of those bugs, and gets higher marks from us in our initial testing.

Why should I switch?
Atmel Studio is a great choice for users that have outgrown the integrated Arduino IDE. The Arduino IDE does so much under the hood that it can actually be quite limiting for experienced programmers. Arduino IDE make life hard when working on advanced projects.

AVR Studio is a huge step up from those limitations, but for many, making the switch cold turkey is just that: a huge step. If you have a big project, porting the entire thing to pure C can be a daunting task. Plus, some of those Arduino libraries are just so darn convenient. Software serial, anyone? Ethernet capability? Aw yeah.

So why not have the best of both worlds? Arduino is basically a wrapper on top of C/C++ anyway, so technically, it’s possible to combine any Arduino sketch or library with your own custom code. The trick is in setting up your project properly. Here are the steps to create a fully functional Arduino project in AVR Studio 6. Once accomplished, you can keep access to the huge Arduino user-contributed code library, but enjoy all the features of advanced AVR and a real IDE.

The following video shows the step by step guide to achieve this:


To download the template click here.

1 comment:

  1. Hello,
    Just I have watched the Video. Gr8 Informative.
    I Will try this one.
    Thanks

    Ravi

    ReplyDelete