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I have fond memories working on Atmel chips, started with 89C52 and graduated to ATmega8 later on. It was such a fun experience building "medical devices" with

I have fond memories working on Atmel chips, started with 89C52 and graduated to ATmega8 later on. It was such a fun experience building "medical devices" with these chips. First successful project was a commoditized Vibration Perception Threshold meter, ones made by bigger companies used piezoelectric crystals costing upwards of 10s of thousands of rupees - I built one using relays and 89C52 to create a square wave of varying frequency to change vibration frequency. My then girlfriend (now wife :))'s project was EKG wave generator, essentially a device that simulated signals out of a human body that one can use to test EKG devices. Just the mere act of programming one was amazing, you'd have to use SDCC[2] (small device c compiler) to convert your C code to assembly that 89C92 understood, in process I built my own chip burner and use some combination of PonyProg[3] to burn it. We went through many chips due to mis-configured serial port connectors but it was so worth it. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2992204/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2992204/ [2] http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/ http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://www.lancos.com/prog.html http://www.lancos.com/prog.html p.s. I air-quoted medical devices to make it abundantly clear that whatever we made was never ever ever used to diagnose any patients.

jondubois 9y ago
I remember programming the Atmel ATmega8-16PU at university in C with AVR Studio (that was before Raspberry PI). We had a team project where we had to build a Morse code receiver and decoder from scratch (circuit board and everything); our device had to intercept Morse code from radio waves on a certain frequency and output the message on a standard computer in human-readable ASCII text via a serial port. My team was one of the best and our device was able to intercept and decode the message. It's amazing what 3 people with complimentary skill sets can do from scratch. It's a really good chip too I have to say.

jondubois 9y ago

I remember programming the Atmel ATmega8-16PU at university in C with AVR Studio (that was before Raspberry PI). We had a team project where we had to build a Morse code receiver and decoder from scratch (circuit board and everything); our device had to intercept Morse code from radio waves on a certain frequency and output the message on a standard computer in human-readable ASCII text via a serial port. My team was one of the best and our device was able to intercept and decode the message. It's amazing what 3 people with complimentary skill sets can do from scratch. It's a really good chip too I have to say.