Butterfly-- (without CdS light sensor)

The AVR Butterfly is an evaluation kit for the ATMEGA169 microcontroller that was custom designed with an AVR core and peripherals to make it both a general-purpose microcontroller and an LCD controller. This little board is by far (at this writing) the lowest cost system for learning and developing that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how much these things cost them to make, but they sell for $24.40, which has to be a real loss leader for ATMEL. But their loss is our gain, and I’m sure they are happy to prime-the-pump a little, knowing that we’ll get hooked on the AVR and buy lots of their product.






It is simply amazing what the Butterfly has built in:

• 100 segment LCD display
• 4 Mbit (that’s 512,000 bytes!) dataflash memory
• Real Time Clock 32.768 kHz oscillator
• 4-way joystick, with center push button
• Temperature sensor
• ADC voltage reading, 0-5V
• Piezo speaker for sound generation
• Header connector pads for access to peripherals
• RS-232 level converter for PC communications
• Bootloader for PC based programming without special hardware
• Pre-programmed demos with source code
• Built-in safety pin for hanging from you shirt (GEEK POWER!)
• Kitchen sink.

I mean this thing has everything (except a kitchen sink… sorry). If anyone can find a development platform with anywhere near this much for this price, I want to hear about it.

AVR Butterfly can be reprogrammed from AVR Studio using just a serial cable. This allows the tool to be used as a development kit for the onboard ATmega169, or even as target hardware for simple applications. The bootloader source code is available as application note AVR109.

The -- (minus minus) in Butterfly-- refers to the new Atmel AVR Butterflies, which due to RoHS no longer include the CdS light sensor. But you can get a suitable replacement light sensor with the Butterly++ Mini-Kit.

PLEASE READ BEFORE BUYING A BUTTERFLY:
Test drive the book by downloading the FREE first three chapters of the book as a 39 page pdf file:"Quick Start Guide for using the WinAVR Compiler with ATMEL's AVR Butterfly" NOTE October 9, 2008, this is a new version of the Quick Start Guide that is upgraded for Windows Vista and the newest AVRStudio and WinAVR. Chapter 2 is not exactly like the book to accommodate these upgrades.