Firefly

It’s rare to meet a hobbyist, electronics enthusiast, or EE/CS student these days who haven’t worked with, or at least heard of, Arduino.

But I suppose that not many of these folks have had the opportunity to work directly with AVR chips, with nothing separating you from the registers and I/O except for Assembly, or know what is truly happening under the hood.

This is why I created Firefly, an open-source, Arduino-compatible ATmega8 target board.

I have had the opportunity to take the digital electronics core class at Caltech, where microprocessor systems were taught from the ground up - from logic gates to counters to ALU design to CPU emulators. After that, we developed AVR-based systems while aware of the underlying logic, such as what makes Arduino digitalWrite(ledPin) turn on an LED and Servo.write() output a PWM signal.

I created Firefly in order to have a tool for learning more about embedded systems development while sharpening my design skills.

Source: ElectronicToast/firefly