Re: ATSTK525 Starter Kit

linnix wrote:
Steve Calfee wrote:

Well, a USB boot loader would be ok. How do you debug?

I believe that you have to debug over Jtag.

Is there a GDB stub that works over this USB interface?

No, you can't debug with the boot loader.

But you can gdb over the JTAGICE interface. I have been exceptionally pleased with this $40 JTAGICE tool. A touch slower over serial interface than the genuine Atmel JTAGICE-mkII which I also had, but the ICE-Cube drew far less power from my circuit. My target and the ICE-Cube ran off a 3.3v 50mA supply where the mkII would not: http://www.ecrostech.com/AtmelAvr/AvrIceCube/index.htm

Is there a GNU tool chain?

Yes, except for the debugging. AVR debugging info is not available to
the general public, except with an NDA.

Gdb works with the AVR JTAGICE. See: http://winavr.sourceforge.net/helpme.html

As for NDAs, the primary WinAVR developer was hired by Atmel. Can't say I know how much he's permitted to work on WinAVR during the day but AVR Studio has gone from almost no avr-gcc support/integration to acceptable. I'm old school and prefer to define my project in a Makefile than in an IDE so I edited and compiled outside of AVR Studio, but preferred to load code and debug using AVR Studio.

What I was thinking about is starting an open source project doing a
cross platform usb host and device stack for embedded systems. So if
other people wanted to help, it would be very nice to have a cheap
development board with portable tools etc. I have another platform
that is not open source for the OS, so not so good for open
development.

I haven't looked in the last year or so but back then USB was fairly new to AVR and getting one's hands on their USB stack/library was more than a casual hobbyist commitment.
.