Today I went to Atmel’s 2005 Microcontroller Seminar series in my lovely homeown. I usually like to attend these because 1) they give away cool stuff and 2) there is usually a good lunch involved.

This time ’round I didn’t win anything, but the lunch was good.

They gave out their (now) standard Butterfly kit, based on the AVR Mega 169. It comes with some nifty software (you can display a geeky scrolling nametag) and a bootloader so you can quickly upload new programs via AVR Studio. You can solder headers to the provided through-holes and use it as a nice and compact robot controller.

Digikey sells it for $20.