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The AVR Butterfly is a self-contained, battery-powered demonstration board running the ATMEL AVR ATmega169V Microcontroller. The board includes an LCD screen, joystick, speaker, serial port, RTC, flash chip, temperature, light & voltage sensors. The board has a shirt pin on its back and can be worn as a name badge.
The AVR Butterfly comes preloaded with software to demonstrate the capabilities of the microcontroller. Factory firmware can scroll your name, display the sensor readings, and show the time. Also, the AVR Butterfly has a piezo buzzer that can reproduce sound.
The AVRButterfly demonstrates LCD driving by running a 14-segment, 6 alpha-numeric character display. However, the LCD interface consumes many of the I/O pins.
The Butterfly's ATmega 169 CPU is capable of speeds up to 8Mhz, however it is factory set by software to 2Mhz to preserve the button battery life. A pre-installed bootloader program allows the board to be re-programmed with a standard RS-232 serial plug.
Features
- ATmega169V AVR 8-bit CPU, including 16Kbyte of Flash memory for code storage and 512 bytes of EEPROM for data storage
- 100-segment LCD display (no backlight)
- 4-Mbit (512-Kbyte) AT45 flash memory
- 4-way Mini-Joystick with center push-button
- Light, temperature, and voltage (0-5V range) sensors
- Piezo speaker
- Solder pads for user-supplied connectors: 2 8-bit I/O ports, ISP, USI, JTAG
- RS232 level converter & interface (Cable and connector provided by end user)
- 3V battery holder (CR2450 battery included)
The Butterfly comes preloaded with software that demonstrates many features of the ATmega169, including reading of the ambient light level and temperature and playback of musical notes. The device has a clothing-pin attached to the back, so it may be worn as a nametag -- the "name" may be entered via the joystick or over the RS232 port, and will scroll across the LCD screen.
Software may be written for the Butterfly using the Atmel AVR assembly language or C. The unit may be reprogrammed through the RS232 serial port (requiring no special hardware), as well ss the ISP and JTAG ports.
The Butterfly is capable of speeds up to 8Mhz, although the factory bootloader defaults all programs to 2Mhz. There are free replacement bootloaders available that will launch programs at higher speeds.
The Butterfly is popular among hobbyists for its low price, its flexibility, the availability of free development software and the ability to reprogram it without using special hardware. Many fully-usable projects have been built using the Butterfly as a base platform, often with few or no additional parts:
Butterfly Specific Sites
- Butterfly Beginner Site
- Butterfly & Beginner's Forum
- Butterfly Beginner's Yahoo Forum
- Atmel's product page
- Getting Started Guide
Butterfly Specific Projects
- Port of the AVRButterfly demo firmware to the AVR-GCC compiler
- FlutterBot - An educational robot based on the AVR Butterfly.
- Butterfly MP3 - An open source MP3 player based on the AVR Butterfly.
- Butterfly Logger - An open source datalogger project based on the AVR Butterfly.
- ButtLoad - Open source firmware-only solution to transform the Butterfly into an AVRStudio-compatible AVRISP programmer clone.
References
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