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The module

The module

Well, the name is a bit too big for a project as little as this, but I couldn’t think of anything better at that moment.

It is a little circuit you can use on your bread-board. Most microcontroller-projects run at 5V, but cheap power supplies lack this setting. So the first step in building a circuit on a bread-board is building the power supply. Over and over again.

This is not much fun, so I built this circuit to use it ‘en bloc’. After building it, I thought of inserting another diode to prevent wrong connection to the power supply. Too late for me, but you should put one in if you build one of these.

I created the label using Eagle, even if it is not derived from the circuit I used. Anyway: It’s in the downloadable package.

Plagiarism?

The circuit

The circuit

At first I didn’t want to release this to the public. But after finding a link to a similar project in the Make Magazine — it’s on Instructable, and a detailed step-by-step guide to a circuit like this at SparkFun I did.

I just can say: I did it before I saw the other articles. :-)

I suppose the idea is simple enough for anybody to have it…

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See also…

  • SparkFun – detailed description of a similar project
  • Instructables – step-by-step-description of a similar project

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This article hasn’t been in the blog until 2015, I took it from my old CMS.

The new adapter

The new adapter

The common programmer-adapters for AVR-controllers come with a ten-pin connector that is connected to the target circuit. Why the thing has to have ten pins, I don’t understand. Four of them are connected to the ground, and one isn’t connected at all. So effectively there stay six pins that are really solving a purpose.

The problem

When developing a prototype on a breadboard, it is not really possible to connect the ten-pin connector on it. I built myself some kind of an adapter cable to connect every pin onto the board.

As you can see, it’s really ugly and not quite stable. Plastic parts are getting weak during the soldering-process, and they are not really stable.

The solution

The adapter at work

The adapter at work

To make it a bit more elegant, I made this little tool. I printed the pin configuration using Eagle CAD. You can find the required file in the end of this page. So I just have to consider the controller’s documentation for the pin-settings, not for connecting the ISP-adapter to it.

Beneath the printed cardboard, there is a simple circuit board. Otherwise there is a ten-pin connector for connecting the ISP-adapter, and a six-pin connector that is attached to the breadboard. I pressed the pins until they are almost fully beneath the board, so it fits tighter to the breadboard.

Oh, and the wires on the board’s lower side are painted. And not soldered really niceliy, but the mainthing is: it works!

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