Getting started with Arduino & AVR

It seems projects using embedded micro-controllers are quite popular, with many references to them on Hack a Day and instructables.  I decided to take the plunge.

I'm cheap, so spending $25 for an Arduino UNO was out of the question.  For that price, my money would be better spent on a Raspberry Pi.  A UNO clone for ~$10, or a DigiSpark ($11.95 shipped) was looking more attractive.  I decided to order a variant of Sparkfun's Pro Mini from Fasttech for $5.25.

I could have gone for an even cheaper option of a bare ATtiny85 (and did order a couple of these as well), but wanted a more complete functioning Arduino-compatible board to start off with.  The AVR CPUs on the Arduino boards have bootloader firmware pre-installed, making programming a bit simpler.  LadyAda has a tutorial on AVR programming, so I won't duplicate it.  The bootloader uses serial TTL (0-5V) to communicate with the development host - both for downloading code and for your code to write to the host.  Comm ports on a computer (RS232) typically use -12 to +12V, so I'll either need to build a simple serial port adapter, or buy a USB to TTL serial adapter.  Since most new computers don't have serial ports, I'll probably go the USB route.

I'm planning to do my development in C under Linux.  That requires installing avr-gcc and binutils.  The package I installed are cross-avr-gcc, cross-avr-binutils, and avrdude.  The Arduino IDE is available for Linux, however I'm comfortable with vi and a shell prompt.  The Arduino libraries are in C++, and given the limited code space I'll be dealing with (8K in the ATtiny85), I want the code size efficiency of C.  Arduino Lite provides the basic functions of the Arduino library in less than half the code size.