Tag Archives: ATTINY

DIY UPDI PROGRAMMER

#117 A DIY UPDI plug and play board

Making fast and crude but reliable programmers

When getting into the new ATtiny series (tinyAVR-0 tinyAVR-1 tinyAVR-2 IC’s) of microcontrollers a few years ago I noticed how easy it had become to program them with only a few extra components.

I started out with just a 4.7k resistor and a cheap CH340 programmer. Then 3 wire hook-ups later I could easily program my IC’s. The only downside was that I had to sacrifice the UPDI pin to the dedicated Pin gods.. so I couldn’t use that pin unless I wanted to make my life more difficult.

Well this was okey for me and ever since I always have the UPDI pin open only for programming. So all my designs incorporate this principal. If I really need more pins I would use an affordable IO expander IC.

Now with that being said it’s all good and well programming with a mini rats nest… but I wanted to create a simple plug and play DIY programmer with commonly available parts and plug and play compatibility.

So I came up with a small circuit that’s easy to build on stripboard. I created a few versions over the years. Since I was the only one using this contraption I didn’t think of creating a professionally made PCB but that will come in future..

Front of the stripboard
Back of the stripboard

How do I use this?

Basically I solder the SMD package ATtiny to a suitable breakout PCB then I plug the ATtiny breakout PCB into my programmers female headers making sure the orientation is correct and presto all I need to do is upload my firmware. Then I can just remove the PCB and Plug it into my project

Simple and to the point… plus it’s been working for years.