AVR ISP Header for Breadboards
Using an AVR in a breadboard can be a bit ugly because programmers like the AVRISP mkII and the USBtinyISP can’t easily be plugged into a breadboard.
You can simply stick wires in the programmer’s jack and plug them into a breadboard (like they do here) but if you want something a little cleaner you can solder up a simple header board like this:
You just need a small piece of perfboard, a 2×3 pin header block, a 6-pin header row, and a little bit of wire. I found it was easier to route the wires if I didn’t bother trying to get the output pins to be sequential. Solder it together and you can leave it in your breadboard, ready for whenever you need to reprogram your microcontroller.
October 22nd, 2007 at 7:25 am
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October 29th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Since when do you do electronics and embedded development? I wish I had known. How do you like the AVR?
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
This is a recent thing, triggered by a combination of Make magazine and seeing an ambient orb in person. Before this I hadn’t used my soldering iron since college.
So far I’m liking the AVR. It is a little hard to get started, because of the overwhelming number of options out there (which AVR chip do I need? Which programmer? Which software suite should I use? etc.). I really like being able to program in C on Linux/OSX, and I really like that the thing runs at 8 MHz out of the box. I got an ATMega168, so if I get tired of doing the bare AVR thing I can burn the Arduino bootloader on it and use it as an Arduino.
December 7th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
[...] The only AVR-specific part of your circuit is an ISP programming header. This is where you plug in the programmer to download your software onto the AVR chip. It is really easy to build a small ISP adapter that plugs into your breadboard. I explained how I built one here. I suppose you could also just jam wires into your breadboard, but that would be messy. [...]
March 7th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Yes, plugging all those wires into your breadboard would be indeed messy! Good call ol’ fellow!