Boards have arrived!

Wednesday was board-day for me, as both my AVR ICSP breadboard adapter (ordered from BatchPCB) and my RGB button pad (ordered from Advanced Circuits) arrived. Much to my delight (and, to be honest, a little to my surprise), they both seem to work great. If you got in touch with me about the breadboard adapters, you'll be hearing from me soon; some are not spoken for, so if you'd like one, get in touch (jmg shift-2 upwardnotnorthward dot com). Expect a full post on the RGB pad once I've got it all up and running (right now I only have four RGB LEDs, so I'm waiting for more to arrive before I can fully build it).

Oh, and Advanced Circuits included a bag of microwave popcorn with my board order. Seriously.

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AVR ICSP 6-pin breadboard adapter

Update: the boards have arrived. If you're interested in getting one, please email me at jmg (shift-2) upwardnotnorthward (period) com.

I think I'm really starting to get the hang of EAGLE CAD; not only is it no longer frustrating, I now really enjoy designing boards in it.

I've been teaching myself about directly programming AVR chips (stay posted for an article on that), and since I'm too stubborn (and cheap) to pay for a development board, I built and have been using an Evil Mad Scientist Labs-style minimalist target board. It works great, but the problem is you more-or-less need a different board for every different type of chip you want to program, plus, you need to shuttle the chip back and forth from the breadboard to the programmer. It would be great to be able to program the chip in-breadboard, by the dual-row header pin won't allow that. You can run wires directly from your programmer to the breadboard, but that's a little messy. So, I decided to make a simple breadboard adapter for the ICSP header.

This has been done before, but I really don't like dealing with perfboard, and I was itching to try having a PCB manufactured, so I designed the adapter and ordered a bunch up from Sparkfun's BatchPCB service. My design is set up so that the Vcc and GND connect directly into the bus lines of the breadboard to save two wires later on. I ordered a bunch of extras, so if anyone out there is interested in one, drop me an email and we'll work something out (assuming they work properly when they arrive).

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