Just a few small remarks:

For the atmel, there are allot of open source tools available.

A small list:

1. avr-gcc: You can find info here
2. binutils-avr: Allot of useful utilities, can’t find a website for this.
3. avrdude: A programmer. This one works very well (it worked in cases that uisp failed).  website here

One of the few things I just found out, and are really useful are the following:

 avr-size

This is gives a list of how big the program is, how many static data, and un-initialized data.

example output:

*   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
1930      42      77    2049     801 test.out
*

** Another one that is really useful:

avr-objdump -h -S > test.lst 

This returns a mix of C and assembler, this gives you a quick view in how long something takes to execute, or to check how gcc translated the code.

More later,

Qball