Thursday 5 May 2011

Homebrew Arduino development board

Inspired by Romilly's veroduino but requiring some hand-holding to get me started, I happened upon Oomlout's Component Bundle for Arduino Compatible --- I already had some breadboard lying around. While I was there I picked up a USB-Serial cable (which you need in order to actually program the thing).

Having assembled the kit by following the instructions for the BBAC (hint: you can use plain wire instead of 0-ohm resistors!) and tested that it was working (mostly: the cable is too heavy for the serial port header on the breadboard, it kept pulling it loose, making it next to impossible to download sketches), I decided that the thing would need a permanent home: stripboard (or veroboard as it used to be called).

Here are the bits required for a minimal development board:
  • 6-way male header
  • 2x10k
  • pushbutton (reset)
  • 2x16-way female header (14-way would do but that's all bitsbox had)
  • 16MHz crystal
  • 100nF ceramic
  • 2x22pF ceramic
  • 28-pin DIL socket
  • ATMega328 flashed with Arduino bootloader
  • Stripboard 26 lines x 15 holes
I left off the 5v DC converter circuit because the board gets its power from the host PC, via the serial cable. At your option you may wish to add a power LED, or an additional LED on pin 13, for the 'blink' demo. (The BBAC shows how to wire each of these.)

Once you have this wired up, your breadboard is freed-up for actual experimentation!

The board assembled:



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