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t_bear

Posted: Aug 15, 2011 - 02:36 PM

Joined: Jan 10, 2011
Posts: 15

Atmel invites all users in the AVRfreaks community to participate in the ASF Designers contest.

Task:
Create an AVR project using ASF, and write a blog style review of ASF and the development process of your project.

Rules and tips:
- Feel free to select the AVR project yourself, but ASF should be used.
- The main target is to demonstrate the ease of use and advantages of ASF, but drawbacks, enhancement proposals and potential pitfalls should be well covered in the review.
- The development process and review of ASF is as important as the project itself.
- Upload your project and review to the AVR freaks project page and prefix it with ASF review: Example name "[ASF review] Your project name"
- Both zip file of project and review (.pdf, .doc, .html page) should be uploaded.
- All code submitted in the contest will be open source as for other AVR freaks projects.
- Atmel may use the project and ASF review for internal evaluation of ASF

Awards for best review/project

1. prize
Complete AVR development kit containing:
AVR ONE!
JTAGICE mkII
JTAGICE 3
AVR Dragon
STK600
STK500
Atmel DIP Socket Card for STK600
Atmel STK600-RC008T-2
AVRISP mkII
XMEGA-A1 Xplained
Mega-1284P-Xplained
UC3-L0 Xplained

2. Prize
JTAGICE3
XMEGA-A1 Xplained
Mega-1284P-Xplained
UC3-L0 Xplained

3. Prize
JTAGICE mkII
XMEGA-A1 Xplained

Deadline:
Friday September 9th (UPDATED!)

Atmel Norway
ASF development team

Last edited by t_bear on Aug 22, 2011 - 07:24 AM; edited 4 times in total

fnadeau

Posted: Aug 15, 2011 - 03:12 PM

Joined: Oct 29, 2007
Posts: 8

Do we have to submit the whole project or a strip down(but still functional) is allowed?

We have a project that we just finished(still tweaking but functionnal) and we intensively used the ASF, which makes it a good quandidate. One of it's purpose is to act as a black box on a CANbus network, hence it has a huge table to define all network variable. Would it be ok to strip the CAN read function to save message nowhere and the Save to SD function to just dump garbage on the SD?

Thanks

clawson

Posted: Aug 15, 2011 - 03:47 PM

Joined: Jul 18, 2005
Posts: 62944
Location: (using avr-gcc in) Finchingfield, Essex, England

Wouldn't it be fairer to split the prizes into groups? Why would anyone with an AVR One! want or need an ICEIII, ICEII, Dragon or AVRISPmkII? Or are you simply expecting the lesser devices to be sold on ebay by the winner? In which case why not offer them one each of the top of the range items and a cash prize?

(BTW you may want to make it clearer who retains the copyright of any IPR generated by this Wink

)

_________________

t_bear

Posted: Aug 16, 2011 - 06:45 AM

Joined: Jan 10, 2011
Posts: 15

fnadeau wrote:

Do we have to submit the whole project or a strip down(but still functional) is allowed?

You don't need to submit the whole project, but the project should be functional and compile.

As stated, documenting and reviewing the process of using ASF is equally important as the project itself.

clawson wrote:

For many freaks, having a complete AVR development suite will have a major collectors value.

clawson wrote:

(BTW you may want to make it clearer who retains the copyright of any IPR generated by this Wink

)

All projects submitted in this contest will be open source code that both AVR freaks user and Atmel may use. Atmel will use the review both for demonstration of how to develop code with ASF and for internal evaluation of ASF.

hugoboss

Posted: Aug 16, 2011 - 05:53 PM

Joined: Feb 19, 2010
Posts: 509
Location: Montreal, QC, CA

Why does the short deadline and requirements make me feel like this is someone at Atmel trying to offload his work onto the forums?

No real contest would give participants 10 days total to produce a complete project. Even less so on some newish software development kit barely anyone uses.

t_bear

Posted: Aug 17, 2011 - 08:25 AM

Joined: Jan 10, 2011
Posts: 15

hugoboss wrote:

The purpose of this contest is not to outsource any work to external developers.

The main purpose is to gain knowledge on strengths and weaknesses of ASF, and how the framework is used. The outcome of this contest may contribute to affect how ASF will evolve in the future.

As written in the "rules & tips" section, the development process and the written review text is as important as the project itself. So creating a LED chaser and writing an excellent review documenting the entire development process:
- how did ASF help you to complete your project faster
- what would be faster to do without ASF
- which modules are good and can be easily used straight from the box
- which modules needs to be re-written to suit your needs
- did you start your project from scratch, or did you combine and modify existing examples
+++

Such an approach will have better chances to win the competition than developing a highly advanced application and submitting a .txt file stating that "asf is pretty good and helped me a lot, but the dma driver was not good so I had to write my own."

ASF is all about rapid prototyping, and the purpose is to help developers to complete projects faster. That is the reason for the short deadline.

Focus on documenting the development process and the review, and not to make the most advanced and creative project.

Atmel Norway
ASF developers

asf-test

Posted: Aug 17, 2011 - 05:46 PM

Joined: Aug 17, 2011
Posts: 37

Last edited by asf-test on Sep 14, 2011 - 10:37 PM; edited 1 time in total

tinkerer

Posted: Aug 17, 2011 - 08:14 PM

Joined: Apr 19, 2011
Posts: 47
Location: Vancouver, CA

@asf-test: I don't know who you are, but I want you out of my head immediately.

It's like you were watching over my shoulder as I was trying to find this ASF thing and its documentation in some form I could use on my Mac in a command line tool chain.

sma

Posted: Aug 17, 2011 - 08:32 PM

Joined: Jan 14, 2007
Posts: 1836
Location: Nantes, France

ASF standalone archive (zip format) supports both UC3 , megaAVR and XMEGA devices; can be downloaded from www.atmel.com/asf. You'll have to register.
The zip archive contains IAR projects and GNU makefile, and Doxygen configuration so you can generate the hmtl doc version (through the make doc commande).

AVR Studio 5 (http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=17212&source=avr_5_studio_overview) includes the ASF so you don't need to download it, then you can access ASF drivers through the project menu and file->new example to get the examples.

-sma

abcminiuser

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 02:41 AM

Joined: Jan 23, 2004
Posts: 9888
Location: Trondheim, Norway

Quote:

You'll have to register.

Replace "software_download.php" to "software_download_splash.php" when you're asked to register to bypasss it. One of these days I'll make a Greasmonkey script to automatically do it.

- Dean Twisted Evil

_________________
Atmel Studio 6.1 is now released, grab it here.
Report AS6/ASF bugs here.

Jacob

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 08:16 AM

Joined: Apr 30, 2001
Posts: 3
Location: Trondheim - Norway

Asf-test appears to be in the lead so far, as the only one submitting his comments/review. Wink

I hope that there is a load of users preparing their reviews, so that we can get some input on how to improve ASF.

For now it appears that (lacking) accessibility is the first hurdle...

- Jacob (Atmel)

t_bear

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 08:21 AM

Joined: Jan 10, 2011
Posts: 15

We will add the following 2. and 3. prize:

2.
JTAGICE3
XMEGA-A1 Xplained
Mega-1284P-Xplained
UC3-L0 Xplained

3.
JTAGICE mkII
XMEGA-A1 Xplained

Atmel Norway
ASF Developers

joeyAVR

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 12:27 PM

Joined: Aug 06, 2008
Posts: 365
Location: Rockall

Is there anywhere on the Atmel website that actually explains what the ASF is without having to download and install it?

Is it just a software library, and if so is it all for GCC/WinAVR or is assembler supported?

Is it some sort of IDE or just a lot of library files?

If the latter what are the 'rules' for integrating them with your own code?

_________________
Cheers,

Joey

clawson

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 12:41 PM

Joined: Jul 18, 2005
Posts: 62944
Location: (using avr-gcc in) Finchingfield, Essex, England

Quote:

Is it just a software library, and if so is it all for GCC/WinAVR or is assembler supported?

It is just a s/w library (a library of source, not a true library) and it comes in at least IAR and GCC variants (not sure about CV and Imagecraft). It is not an IDE - just a collection of .c and .h files.

As with any such library you #include the .h you need and add the .c to the list of sources to be built.

Personally I only ever looked at it once and back then it was a bit of a nightmare in that everything was located in separate directories so trying to setup your -I's and add build targets was a bit of a nightmare - maybe that's changed?

(from reading AS5 threads) It seems that when you use ASF components in a project in AS5 it copies the files to your local project area (which I guess is OK for "read-only" library code) but the true solution would be to set up header and source search paths and have the files accessed in place.

BTW if this page on atmel.com is to be believed:

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools ... ol_id=4192

the only "mega" that's supported is 1284P which hugely limits it for the rest of us tiny and mega users. Perhaps the 1284P support includes 164P/324P/644P which possibly widens it a bit? If there were that and 48/88/168/328PA support it might hit the majority of modern mega users?

EDIT: Curiosity got the better or me so I downloaded 2.6.1. the release notes say the (mega) support is:

Quote:

ATmega1284P
ATmega2560
ATmega48/88/168/328
ATmega16/32
ATmega169/329
ATmega64/128
ATmega324/644/1284

though under mega/drivers there only seems to be example timer-counter code ? So how extensive you could claim the support to be is questionable?

Interesting to see a copy of FreeRTOS in the archive but astonished to find there's only uc3-avr32 variant and they've ditched the atmega323 example code completely?!?

_________________

tinkerer

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 03:38 PM

Joined: Apr 19, 2011
Posts: 47
Location: Vancouver, CA

Jacob wrote:

I hope that there is a load of users preparing their reviews, so that we can get some input on how to improve ASF.

Raise your hand everyone who hands in assignments a week before they're due...

*crickets*

You'll get at least a handful of submissions, I'm sure, but especially with the short deadline people are going to tend to come in a bit last minute.

After posting my previous grumble I registered, downloaded and spent a few hours getting familiar with the codebase. If I can find a suitable MCU locally I'll probably put in an entry, but more as a spur to get myself into learning some AVR stuff than in any expectation of being able to best any reasonably experienced AVR developer.

joeyAVR

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 04:04 PM

Joined: Aug 06, 2008
Posts: 365
Location: Rockall

Funnily enough I'm getting to the point where I've written enough routines/setup commands to spend more time adapting old ones for new projects than writing them for scratch.

I can't help feeling it wouldn't be too hard to have a simple database driven graphic front end that when you select chip, clock speed and the functions/pins you want to use, out pops an .ini file with the correct values for all the system registers.

Once that works, you could start adding on display interfaces etc.

Or perhaps we need MIT's 'Scratch for AVR'?

_________________
Cheers,

Joey

clawson

Posted: Aug 18, 2011 - 04:24 PM

Joined: Jul 18, 2005
Posts: 62944
Location: (using avr-gcc in) Finchingfield, Essex, England

Quote:

I can't help feeling it wouldn't be too hard to have a simple database driven graphic front end that when you select chip, clock speed and the functions/pins you want to use, out pops an .ini file with the correct values for all the system registers.

I think you just described the Codevision CodeWizard Wink

(also Atman AVR and I think Imagecraft have something similar too).

_________________

superconductor

Posted: Aug 19, 2011 - 05:00 PM

Joined: Jun 04, 2011
Posts: 289

A small correction :
Please change the word from "price" to "prize" Mad

[corrected - cliff]

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