As David Johnson-Davies notes in his newest Technoblogy write-up: In case you’re designing an AVR undertaking and also you want a couple of buffers or inverters, you’ll be able to add a CMOS gate bundle to your circuit. Whereas not an enormous deal hardware-wise, because it seems you’ll be able to as an alternative clear up this problem utilizing the microcontroller itself through the AVR Occasion System. That is reportedly an under-appreciated side of AVR microcontrollers, probably as a result of it’s considerably unintuitive to make use of. I’d additionally argue that many individuals, together with myself, have by no means heard of it.
Utilized or not, the Occasion System was launched within the ATtiny 1-series processors and has been part of all AVR processors launched since then. There are three variations out there, and Johnson-Davies offers with V2 and three, which function a lot of enhancements over the unique. Lengthy story brief, the Occasion System successfully means that you can shortcut leads between inputs and outputs, creating performance – i.e. logic gates – that work independently of the conventional processing paradigm, exterior of even the processor’s clock velocity.
Johnson-Davies’ weblog put up provides tons extra element, together with hyperlinks to reference materials. He additionally provides a number of concrete examples of what you are able to do with these gates, substituting AVR-generated inverters and an AVR-generated buffer to kind a blink circuit (in two completely different configurations). He then outlines how one can make a pushbutton debouncer with this logic circuitry, which may maybe be a extra sensible software.
With this “hi there world” gate performance understood on a fundamental degree, one may see it utilized to a variety of purposes. It is a resolution ready for the best downside. In case you don’t see a use for it now, it’s one thing you will wish to preserve in your psychological electronics toolbox for simply the best circumstance!
