Those projects aim to (at least they try to) be the smallest and simplest ones possible for the Microchip's (formerly Atmel) ATmega328P and ATtiny85 microcontrollers, both pretty popular among the hobbyist community. They can be freely used as a basis for bigger, more elaborated, projects.
The projects are intended to be built on a GNU/Linux environment; see below. To build on Windows, a tool such as MinGW-w64, MSYS2 or Cygwin is required.
This repo is comprised of two projects, one for ATmega328P and the other for ATtiny85, each one in separated directories. Each project dir. contains:
-
A single C source file (
main.c). What it does is just disable ADC and other units for power saving, blink a LED connected to a pin for 3 times and then power the uC down. -
A GNU makefile. Running
makeormake allwill only compile the source and generate a.hexfile; to burn down the.hexonto the microcontroller,make installmust be issued.
The softwares used to compile the codes, "extract" from the binary ELF the HEX file and write them onto the ICs were, respectively:
avr-gcc(GCC) 5.4.0- GNU
avr-objcopy(GNU Binutils) 2.26.20160125 avrdudeversion 6.3-20171130- OS: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS x86-64 GNU/Linux
The first target is a custom, homebrew board with an ATmega328P running by its internal clock source at 8MHz. The following is a picture of the board used to test this project, connected to a LED.
Its bootloader is the MiniCore one by MCUdude.
To program the chip it was used a FTDI serial-to-USB breakout module. Below is a picture of the board being programmed.
The second target is an ATtiny85 running at 8MHz in a breadboard. It has no bootloader.
To program the chip it was made a custom shield board to connect to an Arduino, which in its turn acts as an AVRISP programmer. Below is a picture of the ATtiny chip being programmed.
The following shows the microcontroller already programmed and running in a breadboard sketch.
Those projects were mostly inspired by Mitch Davis' YT playlist on Fundamentals of Microcontrollers.
The low power stuff was based off of Nick Gammon's material on Power saving techniques for microprocessors.