Design with microcontrollers: The Attiny2313

Figure 1. Parallel target board










Below (Figure 2) is a sample serial target board for programming the 8 bit 20 pin attiny2313, a derivative of the AVR microcontroller family.


Figure 2. Serial target board


What you see in Figure 1 is a sample parallel target board. I built these two and another one (shall post it soon) during my university days while i was experimenting with the 8 bit 20 pin attiny2313. I preferred the connection in figure one because it was easy to use with isp_prog 2007 programming software to read/write/erase data from either the flash memory or eeprom memory of the chip. i learnt it was easier to write the flash memory than it was to write the eeprom memory. All one needed to do is to write their codes in C (a hardware friendly programming language) or whichever language they preferred, compile it to generate the hex codes using avr studio or any other preferred compiler, then it is this hex codes that one needed to write to the chip.

The third target board was also easy to use and more interesting to me since i would address the chip directly through the command prompt. I used avrdude, a command line program and so i had to type in all commands. An instruction like avrdude -c dapa -P lpt1 -p attiny2313 -U (flash/eeprom):(r/w):(name of hex file).(hex/eep) would be reflected in the form of status bars in the command window.