I took up this work as a side project when my final year in engineering started. By this time, I had done a lot of practical and applied work in the field of embedded systems and Atmel’s AVR ATMega was the microcontroller series of my choice. During my early days, I had struggled badly as there was no guidance from anyone whatsoever and had ended up spending a lot of money which could have very well been saved. So I decided to give a vital part of my electronics know-how to my juniors in the college so that the work that I had started carries on and more importantly, the ones who wish to work in this field don’t have to struggle the way I had to. I wish I could describe here how beautifully the guys have picked up from where I left and the culture that has slowly but steadily formed in my college. I hope that things not only stay but also get better with time.

I decided to collaborate with this start-up company in the field of robotics and embedded systems who were incubated in my college, Thinnkware Pvt Ltd. We decided to conduct a workshop in the college, ‘ Atmel’s AVR ATMega16 and CAD PCB designing workshop‘. I led a team of six people and we formulated the complete course contents of the workshop and also designed ATMega based development board. Workshop was a moderate financial success and the participants were satisfied. 🙂

Listed below are the course contents of the workshop. Unfortunately, I cannot put up the complete course material and the board circuitry because of copyright and IPR issues. The software files used to teach the functionality of different peripherals of the ATMega16 microcontroller can be downloaded from the link given below :-                                                 Download AVR Workshop’s example code for the ATMega16  Microcontroller

Course Contents →

Atmel ATMega16 

Introduction to microcontroller

Mega16 vs. 8051

Introduction to architecture and pin configuration

Memories in ATMega16 (Flash and EEPROM)

Peripherals and Interrupts (ADC, Timer and USART)

Interfacing Mega16 with buffer (ULN2803), Stepper Motor (Basic Concepts), LCD (JHD162A) and Computer

Eagle for PCB designing 

Why use CAD?

Using Eagle

Using library components and Eagle Toolbox

Drawing Schematic

Generating Board Layout

Manual Routing

Autorouting

Using Eagle 3D

Running Scripts in Eagle

Generating POV-ray file using Eagle 3D

Using POV-ray

Setting View Angle

Setting resolution

Generating virtual PCBs

General precautions and noise considerations while designing PCBs

AVR Workshop Material by Pranjal Chaubey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.