Hi again Aaron,

Yes. All of those components I described are on the development board, and then some (like the LCD and the associated driver circuits). For your "Hello World" effort, you might want to determine what minimal thing you would need to do to make the LCD respond, and then use that as the first exercise I described earlier. You really don't want to try and do anything fancy if you're going to compile the code manually.

Frankly, I'm not sure I would even try anything as elaborate as that. Surely there are some contact points where you can interface to some of the µ-controller's ports. Just use an oscilloscope to look at the port pins as they cycle through successive ripple counting sequences.

As for the "Bible" links, just do a search of this web site for the word bible. Of the myriad messages listed in the search return, if a particular message was posted by Erik Malund, it probably has the links in it. Those documents are well worth reading. Also, read the tutorial on this web site (left column, forth button from the top). Finally, Atmel has a downloadable document for that µ-controller. It has a couple of hundred pages, if memory serves, and is a must read.

Finally, I would like to make two more points. First, you keep refering to the µ-controller as a chipset. It isn't. It's a single chip. Second, you and your team partners need to drop the notion that some of you can do the hardware and some the software. Welcome to the world of embedded systems. The two areas are so closely coupled here that everyone needs to be intimately involved with the whole project.

So get the documentation downloaded ("Bible", tutorials, Atmel document) and everyone read them, preferrably together, before you plug anything in. This stuff you're going to have to know. Then, boot up your board, in bootloader mode, and confirm that you can complete the autobaud routine (from Hyperterminal, type in a "U" and look for the "U" to echo in the window). Then write the simplest "Hello World" program you can, manually compile it into machine code and convert that into Intel HEX format and use Hyperterminal to send it to the bootloader. If the programming is successful, the bootloader will echo a "." character in the window. If not, you'll see an "X". Once you successfully run your program, play around with typing manual programming instructions to the µ-controller (erase bytes and/or blocks, read them back before and after, etc.) Erik, and others, are quite correct when they say that this is not the way you will do "real" programs. But I really think you'll be better prepared to do the "real" stuff if you dedicate a few hours to this exercise.