As David Johnson-Davies notes in his newest Technoblogy write-up: In case you’re designing an AVR challenge and also you want just a few buffers or inverters, you may add a CMOS gate bundle to your circuit. Whereas not an enormous deal hardware-wise, because it seems you may as an alternative remedy this problem utilizing the microcontroller itself through the AVR Occasion System. That is reportedly an under-appreciated facet of AVR microcontrollers, seemingly as a result of it’s considerably unintuitive to make use of. I’d additionally argue that many individuals, together with myself, have by no means heard of it.

Utilized or not, the Occasion System was launched within the ATtiny 1-series processors and has been part of all AVR processors launched since then. There are three variations obtainable, and Johnson-Davies offers with V2 and three, which function a variety of enhancements over the unique. Lengthy story brief, the Occasion System successfully lets you shortcut leads between inputs and outputs, creating performance – i.e. logic gates – that work independently of the conventional processing paradigm, outdoors of even the processor’s clock velocity.

Johnson-Davies’ weblog submit offers heaps extra element, together with hyperlinks to reference materials. He additionally offers a number of concrete examples of what you are able to do with these gates, substituting AVR-generated inverters and an AVR-generated buffer to type a blink circuit (in two totally different configurations). He then outlines methods to make a pushbutton debouncer with this logic circuitry, which might maybe be a extra sensible utility.

With this “hey world” gate performance understood on a fundamental degree, one might see it utilized to a variety of purposes. It is a resolution ready for the suitable drawback. In case you don’t see a use for it now, it’s one thing you may wish to maintain in your psychological electronics toolbox for simply the suitable circumstance!