When I first tried programming ATtiny85's I hacked together my own programmer:
It works OK, but it's easy to bend the pins pulling the chip out of the socket.
So I bought a USBAsp (http://www.lctech-inc.com/Hardware/Detail.aspx?id=3a6bc0b4-9417-48eb-8d99-71eb0e7a36ae
), plugged the tiny85 into a breadboard, plugged some male headers into the breadboard on either side, and connected jumper wires from the USBasp to the headers. It works, but I'd like to be able to plug in one cable rather than 6 individual jumper wires.
What I'd really like is a cheap board with a 10-pin programming header and a ZIF socket, but I haven't found such a thing. Does anyone know where I could find one or have a simpler way to program the ATtiny85's than a ribbon cable breakout for the breadboard?
The first two both have standard dip sockets, which I'm trying to get away from. And $16.90 for the 2nd one? Crazy.
The Adafruit adapter is the closest to what I'm looking for, and the price is reasonable. But I'd still need the 10-6 pin adapter.
I think what I'll do is make an adapter out of prototyping board and some male headers. I'll make it plug into the breadboard with 0.5" spacing so I can plug it in over top of the Tiny85.
I don't do ebay (or more particularly don't do paypal), but I've already seen them on Aliexpress for a couple bucks. One of those plus the breadboard breakout from Adafruit would do the trick and not cost too much.
I came up with a solution that doesn't require soldering any perfboard. I plugged the top row of the USBAsp ribbon cable into a 5-pin male header on my breadboard. The pinout on mine is:
1 - MOSI
3 - GND
5 - /RST
7 - SCK
9 - MISO
I plugged a wire into pin 2 of the cable header (Vcc) and plugged that into my breadboard row for pin 8 of my Tiny85, and jumpered the rest of the wires to the appropriate pins. It's working great:
avrdude_original: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions
Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.02s
avrdude_original: Device signature = 0x1e930b
avrdude_original: safemode: Fuses OK
avrdude_original done. Thank you.
Probably too complicated... But I use this and a screwdriver (Very carefully... No bent pins in 50 ATTiny's... So far) and it does ALL the other tiny's as well as a 328... RE: Item no.ATPA-PCB and the email is:alex@insidegadgets.com...
Also has the 6 to 10 pin adapter built in as well. For $7.00 from AU.
The down side to using a resonator (there is a Tindie T-85 product W/O a resonator, I bought several ...) is that you only have 3 pins to use for your application, 2 power, 2 resonator and the reset - 8 pins total = 3.
A resonator is really questionable as anything that requires a clock of that precision probably should be a larger chip..
Otoh, I have used many tiny's with the internal RC clock oscillator @ 9600 baud W/O the need for Tiny Tuner, YMMV.
If it had the 10-pin header to match the USBAsp it would be good, but I not at that price. Considering I can get a ZIF socket for just over $1, a fair price for a programming board with a ZIF, 10 and 6-pin ICSP headers would be $4-$5.
Sounds fair - I'll buy 50 off you at that price, with a professional PCB, Indication LEDs, Arduino reset over ride, resonator and output on the 6 & 10 pin headers.
Do you think it would be popular enough to be commercially successful?
I did some checking and the ZIF sockets go for ~50c in production (1K+) quantity.
4 square inches for the PCB would be ~25c
USB connector and ICSP header: ~10c
AVR MCU running USBAspLoader: ~50c
passives: ~15c
assembly: ~25c
total build cost: ~$1.75
At 10K units, the cost should be under $1.50