Bob, now that it’s been mentioned, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at TI is working on it!

@over-engineer, you should post what part numbers you used as the headers are very odd as their 50mil pin spaced but 100mil between rows and I found no suitable connectors. I ended up using 30guage wire and some vero board and just soldered to every pin, a bit of a mess but it works quite well now.

@everyone else, the ‘Wizbang Wings’ that you see in the top solution is the best but the website no longer works and I got no response from him on the AVR Freaks forum so you will need to make your own and they cost about $18 which sucks.

@over-engineer : I was pretty frustrated with using the PICs because of the windows thing as well.

But as long as you’re willing to put in the effort, you can compile the sources for the dsPIC30F and 24 series PICs here: http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1406&dDocName=en023073

And if you’re using a PICkit2 or an ICD2 you can upload code using piklab.

Admittedly I’m a pic person through and through, but that’s mostly because I got started with them and have learned to use them *very* well. I’m working on adding ARM to my repertoire, but AVR hasn’t had enough appeal to pull me into buying a programmer and dev board. When I say it hasn’t had enough appeal I just mean that I haven’t seen enough advantages to warrant it over the PICs I already know and love!

@over-engineer and @Drone, I agree: Microchip’s MPLAB IDE stinks. Why they won’t base their IDE on Eclipse is a mystery to me.

@Drone, the AT90USB162 looks like a great part. If only they’d offer it in a DIP, I’d switch from PIC to AVR in a heartbeat. But you can’t plug a TQFP into a breadboard, and I have a tremor in my hands that makes it difficult to solder surface mount devices.

Until I can get USB-capable MSP430s or AVRs in a DIP, I will have to put up with Microchip’s pathetic IDE and stomach-turning 8 bit architecture.

Teensy does seem like a nice board, and is probably going to be what I order for the next board to put into a project — looks about as good as (if not better than, in some ways) the AT90USBKey, so I’m looking forward to a project that will justify ordering one.

I was a PIC guy for probably about five years (learned a lot about them, and built a lot of projects with them), but certain quirks in the architectures always bothered me. The dsPIC/30/24 series all sounded pretty interesting to me, but after reading about the AVR’s, plus the advantage of the AVR-GCC toolchain, PLUS reading the code for LUFA (seriously, it’s like the Microchip USB sample projects on steroids), and finding the low cost AT90USBKey (didn’t know about the Teensy at the time), I figured it was as good a time as any to switch. I really couldn’t be happier; PIC got a lot of projects done for me, but AVR is *so* much more pleasant to work with. Also, I can’t speak to the one on the Teensy’s, but the AT90USBKey comes with a great, stable USB bootloader (much more usable than the one from Microchip for the PIC 18F’s, in my experience). I have heard that Teensy is similar in this regard, but I haven’t used it myself.

As for the mating connectors, the ones that I found are from Major League Electronics (had never dealt with them before, but they have great customer service and were the *only* ones with a 1.27mm (0.05″) pin spacing, dual-row 2.54mm (0.1″) row spacing header design that I could find in small quantities). If my notes here are correct (they are :P, but you may want to take a look at the data sheets to make sure the options are how you want them; these are what I got and they’re working well enough), the part numbers are:

TSHS-605-D-05-A-G-LF — This is a male header, straight pin, 2×5 (a match for the six ports). This is what I populated my AT90USBKey with — they’re quite snug, actually… a very tight fit. I did much of my early development (they arrived two days after the Key itself) with them loose-fitted in because a friend happened to ruin my good soldering tip.

LSSHS-605-D-02-G-LF — This is the matching female header. Snug fit, some prototyping projects could easily hold onto the board well enough by aligning a few of these together, similar to a “shield” configuration — that’s how I’m designing some of my boards. This is a straight-leg part — you can get them bent for surface mount designs, but I don’t have that part number here with me.

Working on a PCB design for “wings” similar to those in the linked article, based on these part numbers; would be very useful to have such an adapter, but the company who made them is no longer in existence on the ‘net, it looks like. I’ll post designs here, and maybe throw them on batchPCB or something so people can order a set easily on the cheap. Simple enough, should be able to whip out the right footprints in an hour sometime this weekend.