Budget development tool supports 30-plus MCUs

At only $49, the AVR Dragon is billed as the industry's most comprehensive low-cost development tool.

Atmel Corp has released the AVR Dragon development tool for AVR microcontrollers.

By providing a complete on-chip debugging and programming tool for more than 30 different AVR Flash microcontrollers at only $49, the AVR Dragon is the industry's most comprehensive low-cost development tool.

With the AVR Dragon, Atmel has set a new standard for low-cost development tools.

The AVR Dragon supports all programming modes for all AVR microcontrollers and on-chip debugging for AVR microcontrollers with up to 32Kbyte of Flash program memory.

At just a fraction of the price usually required for such a full-featured tool, the AVR Dragon will fulfil all programming and debugging needs.

The AVR Dragon can be used with an external target board as well as an onboard prototype area, allowing programming and debugging without any additional hardware.

By focusing on quality and having only one tool suite covering the entire AVR microcontroller family, engineers only need to deal with a few affordable tools to get a complete development environment.

"Low cost, wide coverage and good quality has always been our motto for AVR development tools", said Dag Arne Braend, Atmel's AVR Development Tools Director.

"The AVR Dragon is another example of a very low cost tool, yet robust enough to handle everyday life in a development environment; and it supports more than 30 different AVR microcontrollers".

AVR Dragon is powered by the USB cable and can also source an external target with up to 300mA for programming or debugging.

If the target is already powered by an external power source, the AVR Dragon will adapt and level convert all signals between the target and the AVR Dragon.

The AVR Dragon uses the AVR Studio integrated development environment (IDE) available free of charge from Atmel.

AVR Studio includes a simulator, assembler, and C-compiler and is the software front-end for all Atmel AVR debugging and programming tools.

A flexible and secure firmware upgrade feature allows AVR Studio to easily upgrade the AVR Dragon to support new devices free of charge.

AVR Studio can be downloaded from the Atmel website.

Atmel's AVR 8bit microcontrollers have a RISC core running single-cycle instructions and a well-defined I/O structure that limits the need for external components.

Internal oscillators, timers, UART, SPI, pull-up resistors, pulsewidth modulation, ADC, analogue comparator and watchdog timers are some of the features available in AVR devices.

AVR instructions are tuned to decrease the size of the program whether the code is written in C or Assembly.

With on-chip in-system programmable Flash and EEPROM, as well as on-chip debug on all devices, the AVR is a perfect choice in order to optimise cost and get product to the market quickly.

The AVR Dragon is available today from all of Atmel's franchised distributors at a suggested retail price of $49.

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