AVR Freaks

Thank you for the detailed response.

1. Any particular reason for choosing that board? It seems rather old and over-complicated for a beginner?

im working on my thesis in a company and developing the firmware for the SAM4E microcontroller, and the SAM4E-EK was the developmental board that they gave me to do my testing etc. i didnt really have a choice in choosing the board/microcontroller. Ive worked with microcontrollers in the past but with arduino UNO, arduino M0 pro and familiar with the arduino IDE, but comparing it to ATMEL studio i feel its like comparing a mud hut to a house made of bricks, almost the same but totally different level. I may be worng in that sense. At times i feel like have no clue what im doing.

2.  Most probably - See Tip #2 and Tip #3 in my signature.

I checked through the baudrate etc it seemed to be what i had declared i.e., 115200 , but i found out that the output of the RX and TX was set from the pins PA09 and PA10 of the board, and i was able to get the serial output they were connected. i checked through the data sheet and just thought of giving it a shot. previously i had hooked it up to the rs232 connector on the board and was just getting garbage values.

3. i have now run into another problem, the board only seems to print data to the terminal(puTTY and the data visualiser) and wont read any data that is being typed. like if i type anything in the terminal it is non responsive, maybe its not reading it? but again its an example pogram that has been loaded onto the board. 

So, surely, they should be able to help you to get it set up?

So far ive been going through alot of documentation and videos, data sheets solved examples to get a grasp of atmel.

Have you verified that the data is actually reaching the microcontroller pin?

Do you mean like a loop back ? Im not really sure how to do that. how would you recommend to do that? 

So what does the documentation of that example program tell you?

The documentation doesnt really say about the connection, just the initializations of the uart, baud rate and clock frequency etc. and the main.c file which has the main logic of the program to read and write data to serial.

Do you have the source code?

Yes i do, ill upload a zipped file of the example program.

Have you used the debugger to see what's going on?

Yes i did use the debugger, and also the step in, step over functions. The flow of the programs seems to fall in an infinite loop at the if loop where its supposed to check the input variable from the serial. im sure why its doing that. 

the if(!uc_flag) is the loop that i am talking about. it just goes in an infinite loop i.e., goes back to the while loop, and checks the if loop again and goes to the while loop again. not exactly sure why its acting like that. Like you mentioned, the input through serial is most probably not reaching the pin. but i am not sure how i can test if it is or not.