Re: Mac OS X and AVR programming

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 10:58:40AM +0200, Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> "Jeff Smith" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > I was wondering if there is anybody out there that is using Mac OS X
> > to do AVR programming.
> 
> You might want to ask Brian Dean about it (the author of avrdude).

Hah - I just saw this, catching up on my mail.  Yes, I'm using Mac OS
X on my G5 and doing AVR work.  I made a few minor tweaks to AVRDUDE
to support the Mac, so it should compile out of the box.  Also, GCC
for the AVR target built and installed fine.  Same with binutils and
avr-libc.  I can't think of any gotchas.

The main thing with AVRDUDE is that parallel port programmers aren't
going to work.  There are some USB<->parallel converters that are
available, but none I found had drivers that worked on the Mac.

I'm currently using an STK500 connected via a USB<->serial converter
made by Keyspan.  The Keyspan driver seems very nice and creates a
/dev/cu.xxx device that supports all the usual POSIX API, i.e., open,
close, read, write, etc.  This makes it look like a regular old Unix
serial port, and it works fine and required no programming changes in
AVRDUDE to support it.

I suspect other USB<->serial converters work similarly, but I cannot
vouch for them since I haven't used any other than the Keyspan.

The only tool I haven't yet tried to build is AVARICE.  I'll get to
that at some point, but I haven't had a pressing need to use my
JTAGICE recently so I just haven't gotten around to it.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
http://www.bdmicro.com/