Atmel 328s and OS X (Baby Orangutan)

Hello-

I recently bought a few Baby Orangutan B-328s from Pololu, and got them working with OS X. Since there isn’t a lot of info on Mac hacking here, I thought I’d share what I learned. While helpful, some of the tutorial linked from the product page didn’t work for me. Here’s what did (I’m running 10.6.1):

  1. Buy Pololu Boards.

  2. Buy AVRISP Mk II programmer from Digikey ($35).

  3. Just once, find a Windows machine with the Atmel software installed, plug in your programmer, run the software, and update the firmware on the programmer. I just received mine (05/2010) and it had old firmware on it. The old firmware isn’t compatible with avrdude, but the new firmware works fine.

  4. Install Crosspack: obdev.at/products/crosspack/index.html

  5. Install Pololu libraries: pololu.com/docs/0J20/3

  6. Update avrdude for ATMega328p support as described in tutorial: bot-thoughts.blogspot.com/2008/0 … n-mac.html

  7. Go to your libpololu-avr/examples/atmega328p/led1 directory and open the Makefile. Change the PORT line to:

PORT ?= usb

and save it.

  1. Power up your Orangutan, connect the programmer, and plug it in to your USB port. You should see a green light on the programmer.

  2. Type “make program” and watch it compile and burn the example program. Your red LED should start blinking.

  3. Copy the whole led1 directory to somewhere safe. Use it as a template to start future projects.

I did not need the additional Makefile hacking described in the previous tutorial. In fact, some of those changes broke the toolchain in bizarre ways (gcc succeeded, but spit out files that were too small and didn’t work - linker problem?). That and the programmer firmware issue had me banging my head for a while…

I assume this will work with other 328-based boards, but I only have the Baby Orangutans. I hope this helps someone!

–Dan