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ATTiny Programming

You do not need a fancy programming shield to program an ATTiny13 or ATTiny85. Early on when I first bought the ATTinys I used an Arduino Uno (I didn't have any Nanos at the time) and simply hooked them up according to instructions I found on the internet. They programmed up fine, but if there were any problems it was usually dodgy breadboards, crude code or me bricking chips with poorly programmed fuses.

Just a Nano and some wires needed

Later I saw the ATTiny ISP Shield from htlinux on the webnets - and I found that this device was way more reliable PLUS it had the added bonus of being able to easily program 14 pin and 20 pin ATTinys (although it seems that in the end this was just an excuse to covet more microcontrollers).

Programming Shield

One day foraging in the AVR backwaters of the internet I discovered the most marvellous programming shield designed by Jia Huang. She made the gerber files available on her github and from memory this was my first (nervous) order I placed to a PCB manufacturer.

When the batch of ten arrived I was so excited that I soldered the first one upside down which was interesting but definitely not functionally useful! It now sits proudly in "The Jar Of Shame™" with my other electronic abominations.

The next one I soldered (properly) worked great and then I was able to program not only my ATTinys, but also for the first time a bare ATMega328 IC (which will be a topic for another blog).

So lovely, and useful

I was pretty happy with this shield as my main programmer (via the UNO) for some time, until I found Łukasz Podkalicki's amazing ATTiny13/85 PCB - and again I had to download the files and have them made, with only a couple of minor modifications.

Two programmers and a wayward capacitor

It allowed me to use a USBasp programmer to quickly load code to the little AVR and as well it opened up many other programming possibilities. For example, I could now use AVRDUDESS to harness the power of avrdude, and also upload directly to the AVR hex files made, for example, from my own handcrafted assembly instructions (e.g. via Gerd's AVR_SIM).

When the freight situation around the world resolves (thank you pandemania!), I'll pop these little beauties onto my Tindie store in case anyone would like to try one - they're great!

In the meantime, see below for a video of me soldering up one of the ATTiny programmers from scratch, and then using all of the options written about above, including the little PCB, to make...er...a blinking LED!