Ok… I am an absolute noob to AVR’s. I bought the AT91SAM7S-EK Evaluation Kit and am totally lost. I’ve read the documentation that came on the AT91 ARM Thumb DVD and searched the forums and am even more confused that before I started.

Is there some sort of, step-by-step “AVR for Dummies” guide out there?

What exactly does a SAM-ICE or JLINK do? Do I need to buy one in order to program the AT91SAM7?

Sorry, for the very basic questions, but I am trying to understand just how to get started.

Thanks for any help.

Wow... what a bunch of helpful people on this forum!

For those of you that are trying to get started, as I am, here is an excellent tutorial I found by James Lynch:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/atmel_tutorial_source.zip

SAM-ICE is an opt tool,you can use the USB port to program the SAM7S by SAM-BA(now named AT91-ISP)
we suggest that you can read the datasheet of AT91SAM7S first,then you can run some test codes in your IDE,like IAR or Keil.
keil for example:
C:\Keil\ARM\Boards\Atmel\AT91SAM7S-EK