Wayne and Layne

Build an AVR-GCC Toolchain

The main benefit of using Atmel’s line of AVR microcontrollers is the well established avr-gcc toolchain, based on the free and open source gcc compiler. There is a nicely packaged distribution for Windows, but nothing nice for Linux users. Given that a compiler toolchain is fairly important, I thought I should try building my own. Reproduced below are my notes from installing all the components of the avr-gcc toolchain.

Click through for a detailed guide on how to download, compile, and install the necessary tools to get an avr-gcc toolchain going with Linux. Also includes a link to download the completed package to save yourself the time of building the toolchain from scratch, if you want.

http://www.mbeckler.org/microcontrollers/avrgcc_build/

SVG Circuit Symbols

When I need to draw up a circuit schematic, but don’t need or want to use a full-blown schematic capture program (Eagle, OrCad, KiCad, etc), I like to use Inkscape to draw simple circuits. I’ve collected a bunch of frequenly-used circuit symbols and standardized them in SVG format.

Available for download in high-quality vector SVG format at:

http://www.mbeckler.org/inkscape/circuit_symbols/