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New support for Atmel Studio 7.0 and Windows 10

Posted by David on 5 October 2015


We now support using the Orangutan Robot Controllers, 3pi robot, and the Pololu USB AVR Programmer with the new Atmel Studio 7.0 and Windows 10.

To make this possible, we updated the Windows installers for the Pololu AVR C/C++ Library to support Atmel Studio 7.0. This means that when you install the library on Windows, it will automatically copy its files into the AVR GCC toolchain inside Atmel Studio 7.0 and install project templates for the supported devices. Adding support for Atmel Studio 7.0 required us to add some code to detect its location and fix two unexpected problems. You can see the changes that were made in the libpololu-avr commit history on GitHub.

The second screen of the Pololu AVR C/C++ Library installer for Windows.

We also tested the library installer, Atmel Studio 7, the Pololu USB AVR Programmer, and the Orangutan SVP on Windows 10. Everything worked fine, so we now support using those products on Windows 10.

Importing an Arduino sketch in Atmel Studio 7.0

Atmel Studio 7.0 is the latest version of Atmel Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) for AVRs from Atmel. It has an interesting new feature that allows you to create a new project from an Arduino sketch. The idea is that you could import an Arduino sketch, compile it with Atmel Studio, and then load it onto an Arduino-compatible board using a debugger from Atmel. This would allow you to step through the program one line at a time as it runs on real hardware and see what the program does at each step. It would also allow you to use the advanced code editing features of Atmel Studio. When you import a sketch into Atmel Studio 7.0, the source code of your sketch, along with the Arduino core source code and the code for any libraries you are using, gets copied into the directory for the new project.

However, the new feature only supports a certain small set of boards from Arduino and Adafruit, which means that you would have to select a board similar to your Orangutan, 3pi robot, or A-Star and then adjust the project settings (such as the F_CPU clock speed macro) to make it work. Atmel Studio does not support Arduino bootloaders, so it will not be easy to program an A-Star without getting an external programmer. Our Pololu USB AVR Programmer does not support debugging, so if that is the only programmer you have, then there is relatively little value in using Atmel Studio to program your device instead of just using the Arduino IDE. The feature does not appear to be very polished and still has bugs, which I encountered when I tried to import a sketch that has multiple .h and .cpp files.

If you want to try out the new feature, just open Atmel Studio 7.0, select File > New > Project…, and then select “Create Project from Arduino sketch”, which is a template that can be found in the “C/C++” category.

2 comments

Hi,

If you are interested, you should consider shipping an .vsix extension to the Atmel Studio 7.0 gallery (gallery.atmel.com). The guys in Atmel SDK team should guide you on how to achieve this. :-). Drop me an email at er.soundararajan@hotmail.com if you would like to create a better integration of your product into Atmel Studio 7.0.

Thanks
Soundararajan
Hello, Soundararajan. I follow your blog for tips on Atmel Studio, so it's nice to hear from you.

Thanks for the offer to help. I did look into using the AVR/Atmel Studio gallery several years ago, but I could not figure out how to install library files into the 8-bit AVR toolchain with a VSIX. My impression is that it's not possible to do that with a VSIX, but if you think that's something you could help with, I would be happy to hear about it.

The bigger picture is that for our new products, we are moving away from Atmel Studio in favor of the Arduino IDE. For example, we recommend the Arduino IDE as a programming environment for our A-Star programmable controllers and Zumo robots. For non-programmable products like sensors and LED strips, we tend to write Arduino libraries to help our users get started, and to serve as runnable documentation of how to control the product. The Arduino IDE is easy and familiar to many of our customers. The features that the Arduino IDE has for distributing libraries and example code are really nice compared to what Atmel Studio has, which is basically nothing as far as I know. Also, the Arduino IDE works on Linux and Mac OS X. Are these issues something that you addressed or will address some time soon?

--David

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