Saturday 25 February 2012

Making it easier to program an ATtiny85

Ever since I got started with an ATtiny85 I have been using my Arduino Uno to do the programming. One of my friends has been through several iterations to make programming an ATtiny as easy as possible. This culminated in him building something he called the "Frankentiny".

I have finally invested in a dedicated USBtiny programmer (~£10).


This exposes a standard 6 pin programming header. This requires you to build a circuit to interface between the 6 pin connector and an ATtiny85. The pins are as follows.


I built the following circuit on some tripad board:


This includes a 4 pin header to expose pins 3 and 4 which are unused and expose VCC and GND.