Electronic – ATmega32 factory reset board

Go into the AVR Studio help files at Help > AVR Tools User Guide and click on the STK-500. It's the same files that come with the kit, but those are likely stuck on a CD-ROM somewhere in the sock drawer (mine certainly are). Pretty good info therein, anyway. If you're using Eclipse or something else, I can upload them or Google can reveal them.

1. There's a lot of them. But, off the top of my head, here's some of the larger players in ARM microcontrollers:

   • Atmel (same manufacturer as AVR; present on the Arduino Due)
   • Cypress (in particular, the PSoC 4 and 5)
   • Energy Micro
   • Freescale
   • NXP (LPC family)
   • ST (STM32)
   • TI

   If you're unfamiliar with all of these, I'd recommend you start out with the STM32 family. They're pretty reasonable to work with, and they have a lot of reasonably cheap development boards available, including the Nucleo series.

2. Not at all. There's an ARM GCC as well, and in fact many of these manufacturers use it as part of their standard toolchain.