Cheap PCB turns 10-pin AVR programmer to 6-pin

wowI’ve been using this cheap $4 AVR programmer to upload Arduino code to bare AVR chips.  The only issue is that it uses the 10-pin programmer interface, which takes up a lot of PCB real estate on my projects.  Instead, I wanted to use the more efficient 6-pin connector standard.

I looked on eBay for a cheap 6-pin programmer, but they don’t appear to exist.  All I find are the same programmer I have, but with an awful, gigantic, ugly adapter that’s designed to go on the project side:

ugly adapter2
Fig.1: Lame adapter for losers.

So you run a giant fatty 10-pin ribbon cable and have this thing jutting out of your project.  That suuuuucks.

Instead, I developed a tiny (half inch square) PCB designed to accept the programmer on one side and a 6-pin ribbon cable on the other.  Because it’s so small, it’s crazy cheap to fab with OSH Park ($1.60 for three), and the headers cost virtually nothing.  Now I can snap it into my programmer and use 6-pin cables, or pop it out and use 10.

I over-engineered mine, hot-gluing the exposed conductors and rounding the corners, but really, none of that’s necessary.

You can get the Eagle design files on GitHub, or order one from OSH park.

bIMG_1928

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