[jethomson] sent in a build he’s been working on that turns an inexpensive AVR programmer into a development board. The build is based on the very affordable USBasp programmer that’s based on an ATmega8. With hundreds of these boards available from China for less than a Hamilton, we’re wondering how soon it will be before we see these boards end up in other projects.
After fiddling with the AVR fuse settings, [jethomson] managed to burn some code to the microcontroller. After that, all that was required to upload software to the programmer is a bit of solder, a push button, and an external programmer. [jethomson] also managed to make this little AVR programmer compatible with the Arduino environment with a small addition to the boards.txt file.
[jethomson] included a few bits of software as an example – he ported the haunted USB cable and adapted the USB business card to print out, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Nice work, and we can’t wait to see it in future projects.
Oh, that sounds very interesting!
Lol, I did the same thing over a week ago ;-)
Dont believe me, take a look at my blog: .
Q – educate my ignorance please. What is the use of this board?
It’s a USBasp programmer, but you can replace the firmware to use it for a different purpose.
I’d like to add that you can put the USBaspLoader boot loader on the ATmega8 so you can upload programs directly over USB without the need for an external programmer. Also all the pins aren’t broken out, if you need more pins accessible check out the USnooBie
I ordered a few of these chinese avr programmers for just this purpose just a few days ago!
Great minds think alike :)
could you use these things with usbprog and reflash them into jtag and general io boards? or are there too many things just missing?
Hey i want to emulate the same board you have made..i am a beginner. SO please help me out