Evaluation kit floats microcontroller designs

The AVR Butterfly is a low-cost evaluation kit for Atmel's LCD AVR family of microcontrollers.

The AVR Butterfly is a low-cost evaluation kit for Atmel's LCD AVR family of microcontrollers.

The kit has been designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the first family member the Mega169 microcontroller with integrated on-chip LCD driver, which is targeted at battery powered applications and consumes less than 50uA at 32kHz.

The AVR Butterfly evaluation kit allows designers to do more than just evaluate the LCD driver and contrast control capability of the Mega169.

With the addition of a few simple connectors, it can interface to LED, switches or other peripherals to evaluate the AVR architecture.

The Butterfly evaluation kit combines common elements found in a typical system including the Mega169 microcontroller, a piezo element for sound generation, integrated light and temperature sensors, LCD display glass, and a 4Mbit Atmel DataFlash.

A single coin-cell battery powers the AVR Butterfly's operation for up to seven years.

These features enable designers to easily begin development.

The user guide and other collateral for the AVR Butterfly evaluation board is available on the Atmel website, and includes source code and C-code drivers for all peripherals including the on-chip LCD driver.

Instructions on obtaining this collateral are included with the Butterfly evaluation kit.

The Butterfly is shipped preloaded with demo firmware capable of performing the following embedded applications: clock and calendar, digital thermometer, light intensity measurement, digital nametag and jukebox.

The demo firmware also uses the Mega169 boot sector, allowing users to upload their own code into the device without using external programming hardware.

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