3 Socket DASA/Serial AVR Programmer In A Box!
After owning and playing with an Arduino for some amount of time I felt the need to expand my knowledge and ability in AVR microcontroller development. The Arduino, being an independent development platform, has no requirements outside of a computer (ergo, independent). However, to do real AVR development work one needs a programmer to program the microcontrollers. So this is what I set out accomplish.
The Arduino itself can be used to program microcontrollers, but to do this an external circuit is required along with the Arduino and the whole process itself seemed superfluous to me. So I continued my search!
Seeing as how I purchased my Arduino from Adafruit, and I remembered seeing AVR programmers for sale there as well, I decided I would purchase or base my programmer's design on something found on Adafruit. Initially, I figured I would go with the USBTinyISP, but I didn't really like that I would have to carry an additional board around to plug the microcontroller into to program it. Again, the selfcontained-ness was lacking. Also, upon thinking about it, I decided that I wanted to build something original in some sense.
So upon seeing the DASA Serial Programmer I knew I had the underlying structure for my programmer.
So there I was with a blank Mouser project page wondering to myself "how do I want to do this?" After some thought I decided upon a basic box design with the most common AVR sockets on top of it and maybe a power button, namely because buttons are cool. Also a power source of some type was required since for the in circuit programmers it is required.
The following pictures and crappy instructions are the resulting project
Honestly, this isn't anything amazing, but I haven't seen anything else like it, so I feel the need to document it. The idea is basically this, throw a DASA AVR programmer circuit inside of a box. Connect the circuit to a board that has common AVR sockets on it, and has all the same pins for each socket connected. Cut out holes for each socket in the top of the box and mount the board on the underside of the top so that only the sockets are showing on the outside (pretty things are nice). Provide power to the previously mentioned board via batteries within box. Lastly put a button in to control power flow. The last step was done because plugging an AVR into a socket that had power connected to it just didn't seem like a good idea to me, not because of any factual problems
The project upon completion
The schematic for the serial programmer circuit. Note: One can deduce the conversion for the 10-pin header to the AVR sockets by using this webpage
The button and sockets mounted on top of the Radioshack project box lid
The bottom of the board that contains the sockets. Pretty, right? :(
Inside shots of my beautiful work. What can I say? I'm a pro...
So some things I've learned from this project.... Well I suppose pin headers and some cables would have saved me a lot of work, but when you accidently order the wrong terminations from Mouser your pride is just hurt so much that you really don't have the will to live, yet alone order the right part. Also I really need to learn how to use a dremel tool. The holes I cut are ugly and too big, which is a precursor to the first adjective I used to describe my handy work with the spinny tool of death. Other than that the project as a whole turned out well and I don't foresee any huge problems beyond changing the batteries, which will require me getting around the mess of wires inside, but meh.