You could at this point opt to use one of the IDEs we discussed previously in this chapter, but that wouldn't be nearly as educational for AVR development itself. For this reason, we will look at a simple application developed for an ATmega2560 board that uses a modified version of the Arduino AVR core, called Nodate (https://github.com/MayaPosch/Nodate). This framework restructures the original core to allow it to be used as a regular C++ library instead of only with the Arduino C-dialect parser and frontend.

Installing Nodate is pretty easy: simply download to a suitable location on one's system and have the NODATE_HOME system variable point to the root folder of the Nodate installation. After this, we can take one of the example applications as a basis for a new project.