Why I chose the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers for my Labs over Arduinos

I decided that the best Labs to start with are the Microcontroller Labs and therefore got myself a couple of microcontroller ebooks . I’ll use the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers as hardware for my Labs. The hacker community uses the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers for example in the form of the Arduinos. As the Arduinos are an abstraction layer to the physical hardware of the microcontrollers they will prevent the children from understanding the basics of the microcontroller’s hardware. Understanding the microcontroller’s hardware will give the children much more flexibility and potential to suit the requirements of their inventions – such as easily adding more processing power or using a different set of peripherals by swapping chips. The children would then have an understanding of the hardware peripherals which are common to most microcontrollers giving them even more freedom for their creativity and inventions.

For the Microcontroller Labs I have ordered:

• 20x Atmel Microcontroller AVR Mega:  ATMEGA168-20PU, DIP-28
• 2x Programmer AVR MKII TPI PDI ISP Atmel Studio + Cable
• 20x MB-102 830 Point Contacts Breadboards 
• 730 Peaces  Resistor Set (73 different values in a set of  10 each)

to start the development of the Labs.

Can’t wait for the chips to arrive ;-)

I’ll keep you posted,

Ralf