After having finished my first projects with an Arduino I started to look for ways, which would allow me to port my project to an Arduino-compatible minimum configuration board. Ideally, I wanted it to be much cheaper than a new Arduino board. In this post, I describe how to put together a working protoype on a breadboard that can easily be programmed with the Arduino IDE afterwards.

The Arduino Duemilanove, which I used for my projects, uses a through-hole ATMEGA328 microcontroller. The currently new Arduino Leonardo uses an enhanced SMD version of the microcontroller. Using SMD parts allows a very compact PCB design and the components are mostly cheaper than their through-hole alternatives. The caveats, however, are that SMD components are more difficult to solder and the equipment needed for soldering is more expensive. Thus, I decided to work with though-hole components only. In the following, I describe how to build a minimum configuration for using an ATMEGA168 or ATMEGA328 which can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. A major difference to an Arduino board is the lack of the USB socket for programming the microcontroller. In our case, we are using the in-system programming (ISP) capability of the ATMEGA and, thus, make use of a so-called programmer. This is a piece of hardware, which is available in many forms and from many different companies. In simple words, it is that piece of hardware that lets you transfer your program onto the microcontroller. The question, which programmer I am using, is answered later in this article.

There are quite a few tutorials and minimum ATMEGA boards out there so that it is quite easy to get an idea about the essential parts of a minimum configuration board. I found these quite useful:

Another help was a close look at the “Sippino“, which is a minimum-configuration Arduino-compatible board. With the given schematics of that board, you can already start to build your own stand-alone, minimum configuration ATMEGA board. Now, you could ask “Why don’t you just buy the Sippino, if it is exactly what you want to build?” Well, first, we are all curious and want to know, how things work. And second, having build an stand-alone ATMEGA board on your own is fun and, furthermore, allows you to easily extend it to your needs.

Ok, let us start with the needed parts. I used the following list of components:

1x ATMEGA328

1x Crystal with 16 MHz

2x Capacitor with 22 pF

1x Resistor, 10k

and, of course, a breadboard and some jump wires

In constrast to the second tutorial listed above, I decided to use a crystal instead of a resonator, because I have the impression that crystals are easier to buy at various electronics distributors. An ATMEGA could also be used without any external crystal, because it already has an internal one. However, in case of the ATMEGA328, for example, the internal crystal has a clock rate of 8 MHz, which is only half the speed of an Arduino Duemilanove. And since we want to build a board with a microcontroller, which can easily be programmed with the Arduino IDE, we just stick to the Arduino configuration that makes also use of an external 16MHz crystal. By the way: The differences between a resonator and a crystal are summarized in this easy-to-read article from Sparkfun. I put everything together according to these schematics:

You can find a nice overview about the pin out of the ATMEGA328 here. This is how everything looked afterwards:

In the image you can also see that the ISP connector is already connected to the board. Therefore, you have to know the pinout of the ISP connector. A quick search for “ISP pinout 6-pin” leads to the AVR documentation which also provides the pinout for the 6-pin ISP socket that we are going to use:

Here, the square pin (“MISO”) refers to pin number one. “VTG” is connected to “VCC”. Note that the image above shows the pinout of the socket and not the connector. You can find the corresponding pinout for the connector, for example, in this blog post from Tim Teatro.

Now, we come to the programming part. In order to program the ATMEGA, we need to use an adapter that we plug between our PC and the microcontroller. The adapter will used as a serial device on the PC and transmits the compiled code (in our case) via AVRs in-system programming (ISP) protocol “ STK500 ” onto the microcontroller. This might sound complicated, but usually you will not be confronted with the internals of the protocol in practice. Sparkfun Adafruit , and probably also your other favorite electronics distributor sell AVR programmers. I bought my programmer, the mySmartUSB light, from myAVR . This is a picture of it:

There are drivers for Windows, Linux, and for Mac, and the installation of the driver was done within seconds on my notebook. In order to use this programmer with the Arduino IDE, we have to add it to the list of available programmers. The file that we are looking for is called “programmers.txt”. The absolute path depends on your operating system. In case of MacOS, you find the file “programmers.txt”, if you

Right-click on the Arduino application file

Select “show content”

Go into the folder “Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/arduino”

Using Finder, this might look like this:

Make a backup of programmers.txt and insert the following three lines into the original file:

[gist id=3051588]

Here is a screenshot of the modified version of “programmers.txt”:

Alternatively, you could also use an Arduino board as ISP . In the following, however, I will describe the way which uses the mySmartUSB ISP.

Now, if you start the Arduino IDE you can select the “mySmartUSB” (or whatever in-system programmer you have configured) in the programmers menu. Before we can use our self-made “Arduino” board, we need to burn the Arduino bootloader on the ATMEGA. Therefore, make sure that you have selected your programmer within the “programmers” menu. Then, select “Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ ATmega328 ” from the “Tools-Board” menu. The bootloader is transferred on the ATMEGA by selecting “Tools-Burn Bootloader”. After a few seconds, the bootloader should be transferred to your ATMEGA.

Your own prototyping board is finished, you are able to use your microcontroller for whatever you want. If you are using a programmer, here is an IMPORTANT thing to remember: You need to press the SHIFT key while clicking on the “Upload” button of the IDE. IF you do so, the message “Upload using programmer” appears:

If you do not press the shift key, the upload will fail. It took me some time to find out this “little” detail. If everything is connected correctly, you could, for example, go on and upload the “blink” program. Again, if you are wondering which pins within the source code belong to the hardware pins on the breadboard, you can find a nice overview for the ATMEGA328 here. One important thing was not mentioned yet. In this setup, you need to power your circuit with an external 5V power supply. For now, you could just connect the 5V pin of your Arduino board to the VCC pins of the microcontroller, as well as the GND pin of the Arduino board with the ones of our standalone board. In the next article, I present a handy little board, which is powered by a USB connection.

With this setup, you are able to build your own microcontroller projects for much less than you would pay for an Arduino. And, as you have seen, it is actually quite easy and involves only a few components!

If you have any questions or comments, I would be glad to get them!