Programming the Atmel ATSAM4L-EK

June 17, 2013

Hello everyone,

last week I took a day off in order to join the Atmel Tech On Tour 2013 in Zurich. On June 11th from 9am to 5pm, I learned how to do some SAM4L programming. We received an Atmel ATSAM4L-EK kit including a nice development board and some additional ZigBee modules to develop sophisticated IoT related solutions with the ATSAM4L-EK.

The training consited of three parts:

learn and deal with the Sleepwalking technology of the SAM4L
Integrate FreeRTOS and see the scheduling of tasks
Read data from the light sensor of the EK and transfer it over the air to a head unit which draws a chart of the values in realtime.

Compared to the Arduino development I did so far, programming the SAM4L was not too difficult, but changing the template code structure for the 3rd lesson was a nightmare. My code did not compile and the teacher was unable to get it working as well 🙁

The day was a well organized insight to Atmels ARM Cortex family and I learned a lot. The Atmel Studio development software is very powerful and helps you a lot to setup a project. For quick prototyping of IoT solutions and creating small products I’ll still use Arduino due to it’s simplicity and easy to use approach.

I finally received a nice certificate that I made the day:

Cheers,

Michael.