Programming The XMEGA With An ISP

August 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Atmel’s XMEGA series of microcontrollers are neat little pieces of hardware; with a very fast clock, a ton of IO, USB, and up to 8 UART ports, these neat little chips serve as a nice bridge between AVRs and PICs and the very powerful ARM chips coming out on the market. Unfortunately, the XMEGAs don’t use the extremely common ISP programming header found on just about every AVR dev board making them a bear to program. [Szu] over in Poland came up with a very easy way to program these chips, all while using the programming hardware you already have on hand.

[Szu]’s build uses a few resistors and diodes to break out a USBASP connection to the XMEGA’s PDI interface. On the software side of things, [Szu] wrote an update to the USBASP firmware to allow it to program PDI devices, and also has a patch for AVRdude to allow uploading firmware from the command line.

A very cool build, and one that allows for very, very powerful devices that build on the AVR code you’ve already written.

Dev Board From An AVR Programmer

August 26, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[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.

USBasp: AVR Programmer Based On ATmega8

June 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

We love our AVR Dragon programmer but it can be nice to have a cheap and simple in system programmer on hand too. The USBasp is one such programmer that uses and ATmega8 as its only IC. It requires just a handful of components and can be purchased as a kit, or etched and assembled at home. If you source your own parts the chip does need to be programmed which makes for a chicken-or-egg scenario. We’ve used the Parallel-port dongle (schematic) from Adafruit’s Spoke POV before. It’s basically just a DAPA cable and a few resistors, a ribbon cable (use and old IDE cable if you have to) and a parallel port connector can have you up and running in no time. This is also a great way to get a friend into working with embedded systems. Order parts for a few of these and give them away to your buddies.