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I want to learn AVR C programming instead of arduino programming. I have an arduino UNO board and few Atmega328 chips that I bought, and Atmel studio for programming. Can I use Arduino Uno board as programmer to flash the chips from Atmel Studio? Or any other alternatives?

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  • Without a lot of knowledge on this subject, this post on the Arduino Forums and it looks related. For reference, what you want to do is use the Uno as an ISP.
    – Anonymous Penguin
    Jul 31, 2014 at 0:25
  • Do your self a favor and buy a real programmer like the Atmel ICE, Dragon etc... You will thank me.
    – PhillyNJ
    Jul 9, 2015 at 1:58

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If your chips have a bootloader already installed in them, you can use any USB -> Serial cable (FTDI cable) to program them in-circuit on their Rx/Tx pins. If not, you can use the Uno to program a boot loader into them (one time) and program them with the cable from then on.

To use standard C, you can use the bare chips or the UNO. You'll want a different environment than the Arduino IDE, though. That can be anything from an editor, the the gnu compiler tools run from a command line, to almost any other IDE. A number of people, myself included, use the Eclipse IDE with an AVR plug-in and do almost everything from writing the code to programming the AVR from within it. (I say 'almost' only because I personally prefer a full-blown programming editor, run outside of the IDE, for initial creation of sizeable projects or major edits and rewrites. That isn't necessary, though).

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If you're starting out then Atmel Studio is a good option - it's very easy to install and get up and running, and I use it.

To use an Arduino as an ISP you're going to need to use AVRDude. You can configure Atmel Studio to flash chips using AVRDude - I struggled with this but eventually got it working, you can look here if it will help - not specifically for the Arduino as ISP, but should get you started.

Finally you should also double-check whether you have ATmega328-PU or ATmega328P-PU - AVRDude doesn't support the ATmega328-PU (without the P) so you'll need to do a workaround (again something that I've been caught out with in the past, [here's how I worked around it] (http://www.crash-bang.com/resource/bootload-atmega328/)

Good luck - programming the AVR directly is more challenging but gives you more control.

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  • AVRDude does support the ATmega328 (no P) - however, the configuration file shipped when it is distributed by the Arduino folks may not include an entry for it.
    – Chris Stratton
    Jul 31, 2014 at 15:19
  • Essentially, it is to use menu Tools -> External Tools to define a new menu command that calls AVRDUDE with the appropriate parameters, using $(TargetDir) and $(TargetName) to construct the full path to the hex file created by Atmel Studio.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Oct 24, 2016 at 17:42
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I want to learn AVR C programming instead of arduino programming.

It's not really clear what you think the difference is. You can use the Arduino IDE to do "straight AVR" programming, for example:

int main ()
  {
  DDRB = bit (5);  // pin 13
  DDRB |= bit (4);  // pin 12

  while (true)
    {
    PINB = bit (5); // pin 13
    PINB = bit (4); // pin 12
    }
  }

The AVR register names (eg. DDRB, PINB, PORTB and so on) will be included by the IDE, however you don't have to use a single Arduino library or function if you don't want to.

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  • Ah, cool you can actually "override" the main function and not use the setup & loop functions? But to be honest I would let everyone drop the arduino IDE. I think code-completion and/or code hints are very usefull for beginners.
    – Paul
    Jul 8, 2015 at 7:40
  • Certainly, and you can specify an editor of your choice for the IDE. I just don't think that "Arduino programming", "C Programming" and the supplied IDE are different things. The IDE basically implements C++ so there is really no "Arduino language".
    – Nick Gammon ♦
    Jul 8, 2015 at 9:32
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You can use the Atmel Studio + Visual Micro plugin to easily get started with atmega328 + support for the uno board (easily program, use arduino libraries etc). Checkout here. http://www.visualmicro.com/page/Arduino-for-Atmel-Studio.aspx

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