Trouble with Timer 0

Question

I'm taking my first wobbly steps outside the Arduino IDE and I'm not having much success with timers / interrupts. I can set a pin to output and light an LED with registers fine but I cannot for the life of me get it to blink using a timer. I have tried numerous tutorials and followed the Atmel ATmega328 datasheet very closely.

Using an Arduino Uno R3 & Atmel ICE (ISP.) My dev system is Raspbian (Debian) with the GNU AVR toolchain (avr-gcc, avr-objcopy, avrdude.) Apart from not having a bootloader it's a bog standard board (including fuses.)

Here's my current code:

#include <avr/io.h>
#include <avr/interrupt.h>
ISR(TIMER0_COMPA_vect)
{
 PORTB ^= (1 << PB5); // Toggle Arduino Pin #13
}
int main (void)
{
 DDRB = (1 << DDB5); // Arduino Pin #13 is Output
 cli(); // Clear Interrupts
 OCR0A = (unsigned char)0xFF; // Compare Register A = 255
 TIMSK0 = (1 << OCIE0A); // Enable Interrupt for Comp. Reg. A
 TCCR0A = (1 << WGM01); // CTC Mode
 sei(); // Set Interrupts
 TCCR0B = (1 << CS02) | (1 << CS00); // Divide by 1024 Prescaler (GO!)
 return 0;
}

I don't know if I'm just not seeing something or if I've set registers in the wrong order but it's driving me crazy.

• Gerben: doesn't return 0 reset the device? Try while(1); to make it wait indefinitely.
• Ashlyn Black: I am going to scream. Thank you! (Do you do the Answer Question thing or do I?)
• dlu: The commenter should convert it into an answer.

Answer 1

return 0 resets the device. Use while(1); instead, to make it wait indefinitely.

• Nick Gammon: Just to clarify, doing a return from main does not reset the device, as I showed in my answer. I mention this in case people read this answer and think that returning from main is an easy way of achieving a device reset.

Answer 2

Returning from main does not reset the device (it would start up again and do it all over in that case). It calls exit which turns interrupts off and loops indefinitely.

00000068 <__ctors_end>:
 68: 11 24 eor r1, r1
 6a: 1f be out 0x3f, r1 ; 63
 6c: cf ef ldi r28, 0xFF ; 255
 6e: d8 e0 ldi r29, 0x08 ; 8
 70: de bf out 0x3e, r29 ; 62
 72: cd bf out 0x3d, r28 ; 61
 74: 0e 94 52 00 call 0xa4 ; 0xa4 <main>
 78: 0c 94 61 00 jmp 0xc2 ; 0xc2 <_exit>
...
000000a4 <main>:
 a4: 80 e2 ldi r24, 0x20 ; 32
 a6: 84 b9 out 0x04, r24 ; 4
 a8: f8 94 cli
 aa: 8f ef ldi r24, 0xFF ; 255
 ac: 87 bd out 0x27, r24 ; 39
 ae: 82 e0 ldi r24, 0x02 ; 2
 b0: 80 93 6e 00 sts 0x006E, r24
 b4: 84 bd out 0x24, r24 ; 36
 b6: 78 94 sei
 b8: 85 e0 ldi r24, 0x05 ; 5
 ba: 85 bd out 0x25, r24 ; 37
 bc: 80 e0 ldi r24, 0x00 ; 0
 be: 90 e0 ldi r25, 0x00 ; 0
 c0: 08 95 ret
000000c2 <_exit>:
 c2: f8 94 cli
000000c4 <__stop_program>:
 c4: ff cf rjmp .-2 ; 0xc4 <__stop_program>

You can see at address 0x74 it calls main, and then jumps to exit. exit turns off interrupts.

With interrupts off your ISR will not toggle pin 13.