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I actually had a question for Atmel chip users.
I've seen a number of posts for people using Atmel chips and was curious as to why you use Keil. I've used their AVR Studio tool and found it to be a very good tool and their support at AVR Freaks is second to none (no offense, Keil forum people). So my question is why would you choose to pay money to buy Keil (or even if you have that tool already) rather than use AVR Studio, which is specifically designed for use with Atmel chips?
I was just curious.
I guess what I'm asking is what advantages Keil has over AVR Studio (specifically when using Atmel chips, which are supported by both Keil and Atmel). To me, based on my limited experience, AVR Studio is a very good, free, well supported, up to date tool. I would say Keil is a decent general purpose tool that supports a much wider variety of chips, obviously. So, if someone is using an Atmega chip that is supported by both Keil and AVR Studio, what are the advantages of using Keil over AVR Studio?
I'm not trying to say "everyone should use AVR Studio over Keil" but I would be interested in understanding why people choose to do so. Do many Atmel chip users use Keil because they are more familiar with it or is there a clear advantage to Keil that I'm not seeing?
I'm just trying to understand. Maybe Keil has a cool tool/feature I don't know about.
I guess what I'm asking is what advantages Keil has over AVR Studio (specifically when using Atmel chips, which are supported by both Keil and Atmel).
As Andrew Neil correctly pointed out, Keil has no support for the AVR (8bit) and AVR32 (32bit) chips. For those chip, Keil products are not an option.
Your question comes into play for Atmel-produced ARM chips. AVR Studio supports ARM chips and Keil has support for the same chips. AVR Studio does not support 8051 chips which Atmel also produces.
I can see people going for AVR Studio for their ARM chips on cost reasons - they may be important to for example students or small shops.
I can also see people consolidating their software / IDE needs thus eliminating AVR Studio - for example, a firm may want to use one compiler / IDE / tools to support a large array of chips thus eliminating AVR Studio.
Or they could buy into a commercial product for its technical support, or (perceived or real) quality, etc.
Too many to list. That does not mean AVR Studio is superior for you or for a particular application, however.
Actually, that makes perfect sense. I guess I overestimated how much I thought AVR Studio actually supported (and underestimated what is supported by Keil when it comes to AVR chips).
Good point about software consolidation though. I jump between Cypress, Atmel, Texas Instruments, and VB.NET (I know that's not embedded but it's coding) fairly regularly so I can definitely see the advantage of having a single software package (though it is annoying you have to pay for each package separately through Keil but I guess that's more reason to pick a single architecture and stick with it). Especially when you leave a large piece of code alone for a while and then have to come back to it later and remember the individual differences of each compiler!
Thanks for clearing that up!