AVR Microcontrollers Now Supported in MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment

Designers who have traditionally used Microchip’s PIC microcontrollers (MCUs) and developed with the MPLAB ecosystem can now easily evaluate and incorporate AVR MCUs - the family of microcontrollers developed since 1996 by Atmel and acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016 - into their applications. The majority of AVR MCUs are now beta supported with the release of MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment (IDE) version 5.05, available now from Microchip.

Arduino has unveiled the new Arduino MKR WAN 1300 (LoRa) and the Arduino MKR GSM 1400, two new boards that are designed to offer a practical and cost-effective solution for developers, enabling them to quickly add connectivity to their battery-powered applications. Designed to make connectivity seamless, the two latest Arduino boards deliver embedded LoRa and GSM wireless standards, enabling quick development of devices and applications.

Microchip just announced its new SAM D5x and E5x MCUs that provide powerful performance and enhanced security features, combining the performance of an ARM Cortex-M4 processor with a Floating Point Unit (FPU). The SAM D5x and SAM E5x 32-bit MCU families offer extensive connectivity interfaces, powerful performance and robust hardware-based security for a wide variety of applications.

In this high quality project, Robert Nance Dee designs a potentiometer for accuracy and flexibility. A pot with 64 levels and precision metal film resistors that is hard to beat for sound or facility, as he describes it. The project started with a clean sheet, looking to address potentiometer design with a quality that rivaled existing designs while maintaining a reasonable cost. This article was originally published in audioXpress, September 2011.

Microchip's latest PIC MCU family brings ease of design with more Core Independent Peripherals and is first to offer a 48-pin package with additional ADC channels and I/Os. The new PIC16F15386 family with CIPs uses MPLAB Code Configurator for quick development and offers Memory Access Partition with write-protection to prevent accidental over-write. A Device Information Area protects unique device identification and calibration values.

Microchip Technology released a new generation of 8-bit tinyAVR MCUs. The four new devices range from 14 to 24 pins and 4 KB to 8 KB of Flash and are the first tinyAVR microcontrollers to feature Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs). The new devices will be supported by Atmel START, an innovative online tool for intuitive, graphical configuration of embedded software projects.