Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has put out this nice tool. It’s a Zif socket for Arduino. If you’re doing a lot of flashing, this could be a nice addition to keep from having to pry your chip out every time. Plus, it looks cool in a soviet era technology kind of way.
There’s always the classic “ZifDuino”. I use two of these for my Arduino bulk programming needs.
http://bittyware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2
I’ll second the ZIFduino. As a noob hobbiest, it was my first foray into microcontrollers, and exceeded my every expectation. As luck would have it, my first board would not work correctly. Mr. Bitty himself helped troubleshoot, and eventually replaced my kit with a fully assembled & tested board due to a bad FT232RL chip.
He LOST money on me, and did so politely and promptly. Best I can do is let you all know how satisfied I am, and what a great little board he has designed.
If this was made in Soviet Russia, it would ZIF you!!! :D Hehehe ok sorry for the juvenile comment but I couldn’t help it.
Do Svidaniya.
Roman.
If it was Soviet wouldn’t it still have tubes? LOL
caleb is right. soviet tech always has that plastic pastel green color look to it.
If this was Soviet, the Arduino would be programming YOU!
why zif-socketing an in-system programmable uC?
So you can program 25x to 500x.
I grabbed one of these the first day EMS offered them. It’s way handy for, say, updating the bootloader on a Modern Devices RBBB. I also used it to burn sketches for the RBBB before I picked up my FTDI cable. I put machined pin sockets in for the resonator and capacitors so I can program chips that have the external oscillator fuses burned.
@ clay
just so you know… soviet tubes will survive the Nuclear Apocalypse ^_^
and ZIF Sockets are really useful when you have an embedded design and can’t squeeze in a programming interface (I actually BETA tested a Dual Core Arduino board, and i ended up two of these things to re-program the chips… which actually had to share an i2c bus which would prevent programming anyways on-board…
Cool – I thought I was being silly when I thought 70’s USSR the first time I saw these. Now I know I’m not the only one.
Rock on, comrades.
David Alan Obermeyer
26813 Martha Court
Waterford, WI 53185
DOB 9/15/1967
SSN 394-80-8956
why zif-socketing an in-system programmable uC?
fwiw, that’s my photo ;)
the reason I built this (bought from EMS and assembled myself) is that I needed to be able to buy raw atmega chips and burn BOOTLOADERS into them. THAT’s why.
we make and sell arduino DIY projects and as a convenience to the user, we preload the software and BL into the chip. after the BL is loaded, the 6pin ISP connector is no longer needed and we can ‘get by’ with just the 6pin inline ftdi style connector; which doubles as serial port and download port.
tl;dr: to install bootloaders for other users ;)