ATtiny85 Sketch Flashing Rig

We’re happy to see Arduino enthusiasts championing the use of smaller hardware when the need for a full-blown ATmega-based board just isn’t there. [Chris] has been doing just that, using ATtiny85 chips in his projects. But he’s tired of hooking jumper wires to flash the sketches. He finally got around to etching this ATtiny85 programming adapter.

If the project is not pin hungry, an ATtiny85 can run Arduino sketches without the need to port the code. The best news is that the Arduino board you used to prototype the project can be used as the programmer for the standalone chip. Here that’s a Boarduino, and [Chris] laid out a double row of female pin headers for quick plug-in. To the right you can see the DIP socket for the target chip. Although this works perfectly well, we would have liked to also see the inclusion of a 2×3 AVR ISP programming header which could be used with the full range of AT chips.

9 thoughts on “ATtiny85 Sketch Flashing Rig

    1. There are new people coming onto the scene all the time…what is a rerun to you and me is an “encore presentation” to them. My only question is why bother etching something so basic? I made a shield like this a couple years ago with project board and it still works just fine…even looks better IMHO, as it fits a real arduino and there is no ftdi sticking up.

      1. Jarel does have a point though. I’m new to Arduino myself but figuring out how to upload sketches to a standalone chip was probably the first thing I Googled once I got the blinking LED demo working. If anything the problem is that the web is getting saturated with redundant stuff like this which makes it more difficult for us newcomers to track down the actual info we’re trying to find.

    1. which version are you using? 1.0 has a bug in the included ArduinoISP sketch, I believe that it has been fixed in 1.0.1 its pretty easy to fix the sketch they have the wrong delay in the “Heartbeat” subroutine you can find it by google. I have had a lot of success with Version 0018. Also if you are using an uno you have to put a 10uF electrolytic capacitor between the 5v pin and ground. I’ve tested the fixed sketch in 1.0 with both an UNO and Duemilanove and they can both program an ATTINY85

      1. I’m using 1.0 (I’ve done the mod to the heartbeat function) I am using an uno, with a 10uF cap. I’ve been trying for a few days to burn the arduino bootloader to an atmega328p. I’m getting the “dreaded” avrdude yikes invalid device signature error. I’ve done everything I can think of, not to mention everything I’ve read so far with the exception of removing the 16mhz crystal and trying the 8mhz internal oscillator, and external power (I hear the arduino doesn’t put out enough power so it causes issues).

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