Getting AVR tools working on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)
I like to play around with writing custom microcontroller code to control LEDs. For my wedding, I did a project with LEDs and the Atmel AVR Tiny 13 processor -- it was a lot fun.
Here's a video showing the prototype of the lights: Short LED Systems test for wedding lighting
Here's a video showing the finished product in action at my wedding: Custom LED Fireflies at my wedding
I got set up to do AVR programming by following the wonderful instructions at http://www.ladyada.net/learn/avr/.
To get the AVR tools, I used the packages from MacPorts. These worked great for my first round of development and let me build the lights for the wedding.
Then I upgraded to Snow Leopard and all hell broke loose. First, the MacPorts AVR packages are broken under Snow Leopard, with no apparent fix in sight. I tried to debug what the problem is, but quickly got fed up with tclsh's lack of debugging features -- I found that if I ran make manually, it would work but not when ports would invoke it.
I tried installing Fedora into a VirtualBox guest on my Mac and using the working AVR toolchain (yum install \*avr\*). No dice: for some reason, I couldn't get the virtual host to see my usbtiny AVR programmer. This was a very frustrating road to go to down, to say the least.
Building the AVR toolchain by hand also thwarted me somewhere in the building of the avr-binutils package -- it doesn't want to build on my Mac. As soon as I entered the dependency hell of installing an upgraded gcc to build binutils and that didn't work either, I got pretty fed up with that line of attack.
Finally, I tried installing the AVR toolchain from the Fink project. Success!
Here are the steps it took to get it up and running:
- Install fink by following the instructions at http://www.finkproject.org/download/srcdist.php
- Enable the unstable tree by running this command and answering the questions properly: fink configure
- Update fink to use the unstable tree: fink selfupdate
- Install the AVR packages: fink install avr-binutils avr-gcc avr-libc avrdude
I now appear to be back up and running! Enjoy and I hope this post spares someone the pain I had to endure.
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