Atmel AVR

I did a little work for my old employer last week on a project that uses an Atmel AVR microcontroller. It had been so long since I last worked with this chip that the compiler had gone obsolete. Fortunately, there is now a GNU compiler available, which was free, but which meant making some changes to the source code, because, you see, the C programming language has standards, and every compiler writer has their own interpretation of those standards. Just because it compiles on (or under, depending on your point of view) one compiler, doesn't mean it will compile on another. All of which added up to a couple of extra days of work for me.

In any case, I have to download some programs from the net, and while I am poking around looking for this stuff, I stumble on the story of the AVR, which is kind of interesting. It was designed by a couple of guys in Trondheim, Norway, which is like spitting distance from the Arctic circle (200 miles). There aren't too many places that far North: Fairbanks (Alaska), Iceland, and Archangel, Russia, are the ones I recognized on my globe. By American standards it is a nothing little town, only 170,000 people, but they do have a University.

Here is a video clip in which they promise to explain just what AVR stands for. Well, they do, and they don't. It's kind of clever the way they get out of it.



I don't know what kind of device that was, it may have just been a cell phone. Marc tells me there is one device where he work that squawks every time he uses his cell phone near it. Can a cell phone jam a video camera? Interesting question.