That youve gone to the trouble to construct the

that you’ve gone to the trouble to construct the hardware, and have the
r modification you can run Blinky in the AVR Studio simulator and learn the
rogramming ideas in the next chapter without any of the
o do things the hard way, ummm… hardware way because
ur ings like LEDs, not virtual things like little boxes on
you e could have a whole slew of virtual things to
on blown Cylon robots reeking havoc on your
istake you, the
imperious leader, for an enemy, would you?
your code will run plenty fast to simulate,
e things, such as the delay functions take too long to simulate. In Blinky
e call _delay_loop_2(30000); We don’t know yet how this function works, but
thing 30000 times. If we simulate
compile the C software. Try searching the forums before asking question
someone has probably already asked your question and received good responses.
Forum helpers tend to get annoyed with newbies who
background resea
Simulation with AVRStudio
Now
burned fingers to prove it… guess what? You didn’t need to do any of that to test
Blinky or get an introduction to C programming for microcontrollers. With a
mino
introductory C p
ardware. I decided t h
o goal is to control ‘real’ th
r PC screen. Theoretically, w
trol, from LEDs to motors to full c
screen, which actually sounds kind of fun, but not nearly so much fun as having a
real Cylon robot stomping around your neighborhood scaring the noodles out of
your enemies. Fun aside, it is often more practical to simulate software before
running it in the real world. You wouldn’t want your Cylon to m
The simulator runs your program in a virtual environment that is MUCH slower
than the real microcontroller. Most of
but som
w
we can guess that we are telling it to do some

Chapter 2: Quick Start Guide
the delay, the simulated LEDs will move at geologic speeds, making glaciers
seem fast, so we remove the delay before simulation.
36
in
main():
akefile in the Blinky directory
the AVRStudio Workspace window click the I/O ATmega169, then the
PORTD, you should see: (the following image shows PORTB instead of
PORTD
• Open Blinky.c in Programmers Notepad and save it to a new directory,
SimBlinky, as SimBlinky.c.
•
Put comment lines in front of both of the _delay_loop_2() function calls
• // _delay_loop_2(30000);
• Open the m
• Change the target: TARGET = SimBlinky
• Save the makefile to the SimBlinky directory
• Run the Make All, then Make Extcoff.
• In the AVRStudio open the SimBlinky.coff file.
• In
, -- live with it)
• In the to bar c tton: ol lick the AutoStep bu

Chapter 2: Quick Start Guide
• The simulator will run showing the LED scan as a scan of the PORTD and
PIND items in the Workspace window:(this shows PORTB but you’ll
actually see PORTD)
• See, I told you it wasn’t as much fun as watching real LEDs blink.
• Spend some time with the AVR Studio simulator and associated help files;
you’ll find the effort well worth it in the long run.