AVR Freaks

Ok I can see that I’m young. :wink:
ASM, BASIC 1978. (for 6502)
PASCAL 1981 in high school (Org turbo pascal for CP/m 17.5 K version).
My first 68000 computer 1985 C programming
My first PC in 1986 and with that Borland turbo pascal and more C, and ASM.
I had to have ASM, pascal PLM/86 Fortran lisp prolog at university.1983-1988
DANBOT we had to write at compiler and DANBOT (Danish robot) was our project. (written in turbo pascal) 1986
After that most of my programming have been C and ASM to 4, 8, 16,32 bit controllers

Jens

I programmed one of those. It was a "scientific" computer that used decimal numbers. But the one I used had paper tape, not punched cards. I don't remember the programming language.

My first language was MAD. It allegedly stood for Michigan Algorithm Decoder. It was an improvement over Fortran. The next language was assembler. Both of these languages were used to program an IBM 704. That was a real computer. It used vacuum tubes, not transistors.

I'm a "youngster" :-)

What a list the above represents!

I started in high school with a PDP-8, load the paper tape, then run your Basic. (Transistors).
PDP-8 used an ASR-33 Teletpye at 110 baud, with a 20mA current loop serial interface.
About then I learned the Sinclair Basic, (Z85 if I recall the processor), TV for display, tape cassette for storage.
My favorite calculator of all time, the HP-45, (I think the HP-65 was the programmable one).
College: Fortran on punch cards on a Vax, & 8080 Assembly Lang on home made system.
Then Basic on the Vax.
A smigin of 8086/80186 Assembly.
Fortran, F77 and MNF versions.
GW-Basic on PCs.
Turbo Basic, (Bob Zale's Language). ISRs and hardward control on PC from Basic.
Power Basic, (Advanced version of Turbo Basic).
Visual Basic, (And total loss of real time hardware control, :cry: )
ADA on Cray I for NSA
Just kidding on the last one 8)
The Basics of HTML

Bascom, on AVR, as of last week, still a newbie.

Never made the jump to C, but the book is on the shelf...
Sitting next to my Learn Java in 21 days book...
Sitting next to my HTTP, The Definitive Guide book...

I learned German and Morse Code along the way, too, but I believe I permanently
fried the fuse bits controlling that part of my memory long ago.

Somewhere, buried deeply in my basement, is the issue of Popular Electronics with the
Altair on the cover. Such memories!

JC

And if I remember right, there was something like

PIC 9999

in COBOL :shock:

He..He

We used to call it "Job Cancelling Language" , i hated those DD cards , but as a VTAM maintainer i had to use it ....

/Bingo

Turbo pascal, using turtle graphics. Circa, 1992-1993.
'those were the days.
Matt

I'm 21 so my list is short :(

-C
-ASM for ARM, 8051 and AVR
-VHDL

I wanna be an expert on VHDL and C only :)

Basic
Pascal
Assembler (6502)
Fortran (a little)
ARexx
Modula2
Oberon2
C with a little C++
Assembler (AVR)

And a few experiments in Forth, Next, Postscript

1998 Lego Mindstorms RCX (language "RCX Code") Does that count as a programming language? :lol:

1999 Basic for Sharp ZQ-750M(PDA/Organizer like)
2000 JAL (Just another Language http://jal.sourceforge.net/) on PIC16F84

2001 PicBasic, Basic for the PIC16F84
2001 Visual Basic / VBA
2002 Basic (Bascom (AVR))
2004 C - AVR-GCC / WinAVR
2005 PHP/MySQL

I've learned all of the above with books / internet / looking at examples etc. Basically learning by doing.
I never had the chance to learn something like that at school :( But maybe in university in 2 years :P

Merry christmas to all! :)

Nik

Wonderful thread guys! ...except for the fact that I'm realizing that quite a bunch of you have been programming before I was born :/

Started off with some flavour of basic on an Apple in my early/mid teens
A couple of years later I started non-spaghetti programming with Turbo Pascal
Then in Uni I did
C,
VHDL,
8086 assembly (a little),
8051 assembly (a bit more),
Matlab,
a whiff of Haskell and Prolog which I doubt I'll ever use in real life,
LabView (quite a cute thing),
more C (on an 8051 and on an ARM7),
and now that I'm away from school I've done some C on AVR.

I would like to do AVR assembly too when I stop staying late at work and re-start my hobbies (hopefully soon)

NxP

I beleive you, it's far from being trivial... and I was suicidal enough not to get a textbook (I thought that since it was a minor two-point subject it was not worth the time and money). I managed to get past the wierd exam using the even wierder and more disorganized notes I took in class and some simulation in the lab.

Unfortunately when I came to using VHDL the following summer as an intern doing some design work I had to unlearn quite a bit of it and re-learn it from a colleague. Tht's what happens when you can't dedicate yourself as much as you should to something

I can try to help you a bit and see if I can find some valid examples which I wrote, especially if you tell me what is bugging you most. I was using Spartan 3 with ISE just as you are, but had never gone to hardware (I was just working on the device's core and protocols, someone else did the flashing). In class we had much older software to synthesize and flash the hardware.

Just a few hints:
1: DO NOT use ISE to develop and learn VHDL. Use a package such as ModelSim or ActiveHDL - these permit you to simulate and learn how to code. You can also design your system and see it working and then you synthesize the same code using ISE.

2: If simulating remmeber that not all constructs and syntax elements can be synthesized to hardware. If you feel comfortable first coding a logical program and then a compilable program, by all means do it, but do not let it confuse you.

3: To simulate remember to create a "top level" containing a "signal generator", a "logic analyzer" module and your module. Generate the test signals for your module in the first with logical VHDL code (since this never needs to be compiled) and capture the output results with the second.

I think I am getting too far off topic, but if you need any assistance and feel we shouldn't discuss here just PM me.

NxP

I started learning computer languages as a progression from learning analog electronics after getting a worthless college degree in Economics. I learned op amps, then digital logic, then Bill Gate's BASIC on a Radio Shack Color Computer.
A gut feeling that there had to be a better way of doing programming led to reading about 6809 assembler. The more 'advanced' Commodore computers led to 6502 assembler, with a very brief exploration into FORTH I remember going to Toys-R-US to buy the FORTH cartridge for the VIC-20 and being amazed that the only place that one could get an advanced programming language for a home computer was at a toy store.
Abandoned the Commodore 64 for a PC in 1989 and learned Intel 8051 assembler. Attempted to learn 8080 but the bizarre kluge of the segment/offset addressing scheme for that processor led me to Turbo C instead for MS-DOS programs. Abandoned programming for eight years in the 1990s.
Briefly learned AVRs when they came out in 1998. Having Flash memory and peripherals on chip meant never again using ultraviolet EPROMs and wire-wrapping a hundred connections between the CPU chip, the memory chips, the peripherals, and the TTL glue logic. Happy days had come finally.
Learned Visual BASIC for a job connecting air quality monitors with embedded systems to Windows PCs. Introduced to object-oriented programming in order to customise Microsoft Word and Excel applications to work directly with data received from embedded systems using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, a strange and fascinating language-very far from BASIC)
Relearned AVR assembler in 2003 to develop flexibility in using inexpensive microcontrollers to replace TTL clusters and to do things that weren't possible before. Studied PICs and wish that I could convince all the PIC users to switch to AVR.
Currently studing embedded-systems C for the AVR by rewriting my assembler code into WINAVR C.
Hope to be fluent and flexible in C by the time that 8-bit controllers like AVRs are replaced by 32-bit controllers like ARM.
Some day I might even be able to get a job in this field, but I'm beginning to doubt it. I always seem to be five years behind the level where people are hiring. Advice and suggestions requested and warmly received.