Sure, mint tin housings are great. But you have to defend against shorts, and cutting out holes for ports and buttons is dangerous business. [Daniel] prefers plastic, and he tipped us off about a PICKit2 clone that he designed to fit inside of a tic tac box.
Almost all of the components were salvaged except for the microcontroller and the connectors. He wound his own inductor using the ferrite core from a CFL. [Daniel] had to make a few improvisations for this project. He didn’t have a 20MHz crystal, so he used a 12MHz crystal and tweaked the fuse bits after burning the firmware.
To save space on the board, he soldered wires to RESET, VCC, GND, PGD, and PGC to program the firmware and then removed the wires. The only trouble he had with it was more or less easily solved by replacing two transistors.
You may remember that we linked to his USBasp programmer in a mentos container a few months back. We figure [Daniel] must have some pretty fresh breath.
Tic-Tac boxes are GREAT for project boxes!
ooh–ooh! Maybe HaD should run a competition to see what the best build in a Tic-Tac box people come up with!
+1 YES
I too enjoy this idea.
Yes they are!
http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=925
This whole pun-y title thing that’s happening on Hack-a-Day… it’s… it’s just so great. Way to go Kristina, or whoever thought of the name “Tic Tac PIC Pack”!
Thank you! I was afraid my titles were eliciting groans all over the world. And while they might be, at least one person likes them.
Just loved the title as well as the joke at the end :). Please go ahead with the Idea of “The Tic Tac of things” contest like someone have suggested.
Regards,
Wow… So… How worthless does your time have to be to spend it removing old components from PCB’s and designing something that can be had for under $30 with shipping? You can get a PICKIT2 “clone” for under $20 if you’re lucky.
At some point, you need to ask yourself WHY… I do not see anyone asking that here. This is a major problem.
If you have this much free time on your hands, you should be out doing something constructive. Improve your life. Come on!!!
Long before the world of easy access to electronics and cheap programmers with sites like aliexpress. I made this breadboard version of a programmer to be able to program my own chips. Think it just might still work ok today :
http://walter.schreppers.com/index.php?page=picprogramming
Nowadays we take a lot for granted. That pic-programmer took me weeks to build and get it working …