AVR Dragon is a low cost In System Programmer (ISP) and also an In Circuit Emulator (ICE) in one package. It operates from Atmel AVR Studio development environment and is great for code development.<\/p>\n
What can it do?
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The AVR Dragon is best as an emulator and lets you step through your code, or use breakpoints, in both assembler and C code. Unlike JTAG ICE, which is an alternative low cost AVR emulator, it supports DebugWire. This is the debug interface for smaller pin count AVR microcontrollers, so device support is much better than JTAG ICE. AVR microcontrollers with 40-pins plus use JTAG interface for debugging and AVR Dragon also supports JTAG.<\/p>\n
It can operate as a programmer as well, using either JTAG or ISP interface, but this also uses AVR Studio development environment as the programming software. This is fine for development but gets very tedious once lots of devices need programming.<\/p>\n
AVR Dragon is a bare PCB with no box, and the version generally available has no cables included either, which makes it difficult to use. Kanda have bundled it with all the connectors required, including 6 and 10-pin ISP, DebugWire and JTAG.<\/p>\n
If you only want one tool for development or training, then AVR Dragon is an excellent choice, and we bundle it with starter kits as an option – AVR Dragon with AVR Training Kits<\/a><\/p>\n The alternatives are to purchase a separate AVR ISP programmer<\/a> or get a starter kit with both a JTAG ICE emulator and a separate programmer – STK200 Kit options<\/a><\/p>\n