Origa.me

Hooray - my USB adaptor arrived this morning and within 1 hour of rigging up an Arduino compatible development board all sorts of cool things are happening! I decided to be a real cheapskate and build my Arduino myself rather than buy one. So it's all breadboarded and slightly rough looking, but on the plus side it works perfectly and I have another 9 AtMEGA8s sat around waiting for exciting things to happen to them. Here's the...

Hot on the heels of my ICSP programmer, here's my simple development board for the 16F628. It's based on Nigel's PIC tutorial but I've used right-angle headers to allow it to be plugged into a breadboard . I've also added an ICSP socket, reset switch and switchable MCLR functionality (via JP1) which allows MCLR to be either tied high with the reset switch enabled, or used as an input.

Oh dear, it seems my parallel port LVP programmer was somewhat fragile - I'll skip the details but suffice to say it doesn't work any more. The silver lining to this sad story is that it led me to build a really simple and cheap ICSP (In Circuit Serial Programmer) which connects to the serial port and only uses 3 resistors.

At last, I finally enter the exciting world of Microcontrollers. If it's any use to anyone out there, Byron Jeff's Trivial LVP programmer actually worked very well for me. Here's mine:

My Binary Clock is finally finished having chased out the last of the show-stopping bugs last night. It now shows the correct time and looks very cool. The ultimate in "Geek Chic" - a binary clock I made myself!