Lately, I have been using my Ubuntu Hardy Heron box for coding and programming my AVR projects using the simple combination of gedit, the avr-gcc toolchain and the USBtinyISP. It’s a little bit of a pain to get set up correctly, but it works very well once it’s up and running. I’ve been pretty happy with editing code in gedit then compiling and programming the AVR via command line. It’s pretty easy to quickly make changes to the code and save the C file in gedit, then use the command history of the terminal to re-run make and avrdude.

However, I recently ran across this posting when browsing the AVR Freaks forum. The author kindly gives instructions on how to set up the Eclipse IDE for use in AVR development on the Ubuntu platform. This looked really promising, since I’ve always been a sucker for nice IDEs (yes, I know that probably lowers my geek cred a few notches). So I gave it a go and found that the instructions worked nearly flawlessly. The only hiccup I encountered was at the very end of the build process when Eclipse was waiting for the sudo password for avrdude (oddly enough, you have to run avrdude as root to access the USB programmer, unless you implement a little workaround that I’ll show you in a second). I didn’t see any way to enter the root password into a terminal, so I had to cancel the whole process.

A bit of thought and much more searching brought me to the answer to the problem. There is a way to get non-root access to the USBtinyISP. You have to create a udev rule to tell the kernel to change permissions on the USBtinyISP. The documentation on the ladyada website tells you to do this, but it only gives you half of the story. First of all, it doesn’t mention exactly where to place the new rule that you are creating. Her documentation stated that I needed to put the rule in a file in /etc/udev/rules.d/. The problem is that this doesn’t state whether I need to place the rule in an existing file or create a new one. After a bit of trial-and-error and yet some more Google searching, I found out that I needed to create a new file for the USBtinyISP. So a new file named 50-usbtinyisp.rules was created. The other problem is that the actual rule given on the ladyada site seems to have a typo in the MODE parameter. Comparing this rule to some other rule examples, it appears that the correct rule is:

SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”1781″, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0c9f”, GROUP=”users”, MODE=”0666″

Once you get the udev rule set up correctly, you no longer need root to access the USBtinyISP, and the entire build process in Eclipse works flawlessly.

So far, using Eclipse as an AVR development platform has been a real pleasure. There’s a lot of nice little touches, like having quick access to all of the special function registers of each device and easy configuration of the build parameters via GUI. If you are like me and like the convenience that an IDE gives you, then the AVR/Eclipse environment is an excellent choice, and may even be better than WinAVR.