The Atmega32 Programmer.

In the wake of this final year project presentation on 22nd January, we sort of started things up with the project. The first thing was the brain of our sensor nodes - the micro-controller - which needed to be get done with. We chose Atmel’s Atmega32 uC for following “good” reasons:

1. Atmega32 puts up a lot of features right on the uC itself. Things like ADC, Internal Oscillator (1 MHz), 32 KB flash memory etc. are built on the chip and thus saving a considerable amount of effort integrating components and it is available for Rs. 200/- from Sigma Electronics in Saddar, Karachi.

2. It works on the AVR architecture. That is to say, it gives 1 MIPS on 1 MHz clock and correspondingly 16 MIPS on 16 MHz clock. While the 89C52 gives 1 MIPS for 4 MHz.

3. The programming help is available in abundance. There is also a popular C-syntax version of programming tools (Open Source: GCC) which saves from getting in detailed assembly coding.

4. Programmers are easily available and can be built by yourself using PC’s parallel port and a software called PonyProg. The schematic is provided below. We have successfully implemented a programmer today and it DOES work finally. :-)

We found them quite interesting for our application of traffic monitoring using Wireless Sensor Networks. If anyone finds them to be interesting enough to be used just drop me an email at gopchandani@gmail.com

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