> I've managed to write production firmware for Atmel chips without having to use Atmel Studio; I have instead found gcc and gdb to suit my workflow better. Ho

> I've managed to write production firmware for Atmel chips without having to use Atmel Studio; I have instead found gcc and gdb to suit my workflow better. How long did it take you to set up avarice and GDB to work with jtagice? What did you use to configure your stk600? What documentation browser did you use to quickly look up the the HVPP or ISP pinouts of your Atmel programmer? Do you sit and manually calculate fuse bits? Or did you cobble it all together because 'blah, windows', despite the fact that just about everything else in the field (Altera!) runs on Windows. You can make the OSS AVR tools work, but it's a headache. If it's your real job, it's faster/cheaper/easier to use the official tools, especially as of AVR Studio 5 / Atmel Studio 6. > Can you point us to any studies that indicate which tools and methods have been proven optimal or shown to produce the best results for iOS applications? Can you point to studies that show that using a non-type-checked minority language and dropping half of the vendor tools is an advantage, and doesn't incur future maintenance costs? If you're just writing for yourself, use whatever makes you happy. Otherwise, the equation isn't as simple as 'I like Ruby/makefiles/avrdude therefor it's the best choice'