Share tips you have come across

Jiggy-Ninja:
If you've got some thing you need to use frequently that requires a complicated wiring arrangement, make a jig on some protoboard so you will know it works every time and not have to fiddle around with troubleshooting it every time you wire it up.

I made jigs for reprogramming chips outside of an Arduino board.

Above are two examples of programming jigs I made. One is a ZIF socket soldered onto a protoshield that lets me use the ArduinoISP sketch on an Uno to program a chip (in this case, an ATtiny4313).

The other is some male headers soldered onto a 6-wide protoboard. The 2x3 header on top lets me plug in the standard programmer ribbon cable, and the headers on bottom are spaced just wide enough to be able to plug this over a DIP package in a breadboard. You just need to grab the right jig and plug it over the chip to reprogram it in circuit. The one pictured is made for an ATtiny85.

I have one of each jig made for ATtiny85, ATtiny84, ATtiny4313, and ATmega328P.

Which reminds me, I need to whip some up for the ATtiny10 and various PICs I bought.

Further to this, here is how I make up a shield like yours.
After coming up with the schematic, I import an image of the front and back of the 'Shield' into a program like Snagit.
I get images of the components to be mounted and size them to 1:1
After placing the components at the best locations for my application I layout how the wires are to be run.
I then print out a 2:1 paper copy.
I solder things up as shown in the images below.

I use wire warp wire or magnet wire to make interconnections.
Wire Wrap Wire 30AWG

38AWG Roadrunner/Vero wire

Vero Wire

Soldering temperature: 400°C to 480°C

WARNING the PCB linked in POST # 14 has a circuit error. >:(
**You MUST corrected this error before you plug it onto an Arduino. **
See Post #14 for the corrected image.
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