I love how you integrated several software packages and the hardware. Also I appreciate how well you documented your project.
Thanks
Kirk

When you use avr-dude with an AVR ISP MKII you don’t need any drivers that I am aware of.

There seemes to be a fairly complete tutorial for working in various flavors of unix for AVR development at Lady Ada
http://www.ladyada.net/library/avrdevtut/setup-unix.html

Also make sure that you get an account at AVR Freaks.
They have lots of tutorials.
http://www.avrfreaks.net/

For determining the types of motors that you have see this page:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/others/

As for motors. I’m not sure what type of steppers I have.

When I mentioned the uln2803 I was assuming you were using a unipolar stepper motor.

When using a bipolar stepper you do need to use the h-bridge.

It would be hooked up something like this
http://i40.tinypic.com/2yye2wx.jpg

I’ve never actually used a h-bride and bipolar setup myself. But I believe that should work.

The code would be the same.

Let me know if you get it working.

Will this work?
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=296-15777-1-ND
I’ll use 9VDC steppers.

Can I use a multibester then a led to check if the code works.

I’m developing using linux (Gentoo and Fedora C9).

First of all I’m a noob to the ATMEL AVR. All I’ve done in this area is write a simple driver in java and python that calls a routine I wrote in “c” to call the parallel port and make motors rotate with an H-Bridge. I call memory location 378 using lptout (0-255).

Then it is just a matter of hooking it up to the atmega8. For simplicity sake lets say coil 1 is hooked to PC1, coil2 to PC2 and so forth. But it is a bad idea to hook them directly as the current draw for the motor may exceed the capacity of the chip. That is why in the cncmagicscreenmachine I used a uln2803. (I personally have hooked small ones directly up to a atmega8 it worked for a while but it killed the atmega8 after a few minutes.)

Then do software that looks something like this:
#include
#include
#define F_CPU 8000000UL
#include
int main(void)
{
DDRC=0b00011110; // set pc1-pc4 as output

while(1)
{
PORTC=0b00000010; // pc1 on – all else off
_delay_ms(100);
PORTC=0b00000100; // pc2 on – all else off
_delay_ms(100);
PORTC=0b00001000; // pc3 on – all else off
_delay_ms(100);
PORTC=0b00010000; // pc4 on – all else off
_delay_ms(100;

}

}
// note the above code is from memory and may or may not work…but it should be close