STK 200: First Program (LED Blink)

For this program, you should already have AVR Studio 5 and AVRISP-U installed on your computer. If you don't, visit my previous post Getting Started Programming Guide (link). This is a simple program which simply makes the built-in LEDs to blink. I'm going to use C for this program because the code looks really simple. The assembly version is not really difficult either but we'll keep it simple for now. Note that AVR Studio 5 has a built-in C compiler. You might remember for AVR Studio 4, you had to download AVR GCC and integrate it. If you downloaded AVR Studio 5, you already have the C compiler.

What will the program do? If you look at the STK 200, there is a row of 10 LEDs numbered from 0 to 7 then "ISP" and "ON." These are the built-in LEDs. Our program will make the LEDs numbered from 0 to 7 blink on and off at a rate perceptible to the human eye. In microcontroller terms, this means physically connecting the LEDs to PORTB and sending alternating HIGH/LOW signals to PORTB. Note that is all output - no input. If you don't know what PORTB is, check my Basic Layout Guide (link).

Step 1 - Create a new project: Go ahead and open AVR Studio 5. From the startup screen, go to File>New>Project... and you should see a New Project dialog box. At the top left of the dialog box, select the C templates and then choose "C Executable Project" in the middle of the screen. At the bottom, fill in "blink" as the name and this should automatically fill the solution name field with the same text. Also, make sure that the "Create directory for solution" box is checked. This checkbox will not affect your code at all, but it will keep your AVRStudio folder better organized. Look at the picture below and make sure your screen looks the same:

STK 200: New Project Dialog Box