AVR Butterfly

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AVR Butterfly Module AVRButterfly.jpg
AVR Butterfly Module

The AVR Butterfly is a battery-powered single-board microcontroller developed by Atmel and sold by Microchip Technology, which acquired Atmel in April 2016. [1] [2] It consists of an Atmel ATmega169PV Microcontroller, a liquid crystal display, joystick, speaker, serial port, real-time clock (RTC), internal flash memory, and sensors for temperature and voltage. The board is the size of a name tag and has a clothing pin on back so it can be worn as such after the user enters their name onto the LCD.

Contents

Feature set

LCD

The AVR Butterfly demonstrates LCD driving by running a 14 segment, six alpha-numeric character display. However, the LCD interface consumes many of the I/O pins. [3]

CPU & Speed

The Butterfly's ATmega169 CPU is capable of speeds up to 8 MHz, however it is factory set by software to 2 MHz to preserve the button battery life. There are free replacement bootloaders available that will launch programs at 1, 2, 4 or 8 MHz speeds. Alternatively, this may be accomplished by changing the CPU prescaler in the application code. [3]

Features

Software

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 name tag — the "name" may be entered via the joystick or over the RS-232 port, and will scroll across the LCD. [3]

Reprogramming

The Butterfly can be freely reprogrammed using the same toolchains as for many other AVR controllers, for example using the Atmel AVR assembly language or the free integrated development environment (IDE) Atmel Studio for programming in C. [3]

A pre-installed bootloader allows the board to be re-programmed with a standard RS-232 serial port, requiring no special hardware. [2] The board also has ISP and JTAG ports for in-circuit programming and debugging. All of these interfaces are implemented only as open soldering points, so the addition of some hardware is necessary to make them usable. [2] [3]

Butterfly projects and applications

Several projects have been built using the Butterfly as a base platform, often with few or no additional parts:

References

  1. ↑ "Atmel acquired by Microchip Technology for $3.56 billion | Experience". www.jonesday.com. Retrieved 2025-12-10.
  2. 1 2 3 "AVR Butterfly - ATAVRBFLY | Microchip Technology Inc". Microchip. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 AVR Butterfly Evaluation Kit - User Guide (PDF). Atmel Corporation. 2005.
  4. ↑ FlutterBot Archived December 5, 2006, at the Wayback Machine - An educational robot based on the AVR Butterfly.
  5. ↑ Camera, Dean (2007). "ButtLoad". Four Walled Cubicle. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  6. ↑ "AVR Butterfly MP3". www.brokentoaster.com. 18 May 2008. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  7. ↑ "C Programming Book for Microcontrollers". Smiley Micros. 2006-04-27. Archived from the original on 31 October 2007. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  8. ↑ Pardue, Joe (August 2008). "Smiley's Workshop 1: Introducing the AVR C Programming Workshop Series". Nuts and Volts Magazine . Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  9. ↑ "AVR Butterfly Logger". www.brokentoaster.com. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  10. ↑ "Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting". code.google.com. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
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