yeah, that's starting to make some more sense.

right now it's just me and another guy heading up the software end of this project, then my 2 other team members are doing hardware stuff. To make more sense you can goto http://people.msoe.edu/~oerteln/sendes . However tha page hasn't been updated in like 2 months or so?

anyways, as far as a "hello world" program, there really aren't any outputs that i can see on the board besides the board, hance why we'd like to get the LCD working first to use as an output device as well as somewhat of a debugging tool. I'm sure i can find some sort of port that's available and start with that as you said.

The other thing as far as all of those other circuits you detailed before... (reset supervisor, crystal ocillator, etc.), i believe all of those are included on the demo boart ATDEV-04 or AT89DEV-04? However it's nice to know, because we'll have to take those into account when we build our actual design based on atmels reference board.

I do expect to learn a lot from this projetct, that's what senior design is all about :).

I'll take a look more closely at the atmel site as far as tutorials go. I know they have some example code, but i'm not sure how helpful that is. The demo code they gave us is pretty crazy for someone who #1 isn't all familiar with embedded C, and #2 is looking at this chipset for the first time.

I'll also look around on this site for some stuff, so far i've found it to be an IMMENSE help in content as well as just simply knowing that i'm not the only one out there having these problems.

if i can't find these 'bible' pdf's... maybe someone could post them??

Thanks again,

Aaron