Hi everyone,
I was thinking of creating an easier way for users to program their ATmega328p MCU's, so I purchased an Arduino Uno and made an ATmega328p Shield for it. While I keep seeing people popping their MCU's out of their boards, I wanted to try to provide a solution to where they wouldn't have to keep removing their MCU's from their Arduino kits in order to program a circuit.
I spent the night soldering getting things working on the prototype shield, and drafted up the sketch firmware in about an hour or two sending over a basic Blink program in binary mode over to the ATmega328p Shield frpom the Arduino Uno.
Here is a video of the prototype Arduino Shield in working action: http://youtu.be/SdATQFxE6kM
I also attached the sketch the prototype board is using, documentation about the firmware commands and a full programming guide to help users get their hex file data onto the MCU's.
Likewise, users can just select the MCU's as is an access the EEPROM for data storage very easily if they don't want to utilize the MCU Flash.
Basically, the firmware allows the user to select the MCU as an SPI device in Slave mode. Based on 16 commands, some unallocated to leave room for improvement from other users, the board has an indicator LED, pin 13 to traditionally show the user when the MCU is selected.
I gave examples in the documentation I have provided, which is pretty interesting. It seemingly uses an interpreted scheme converting user defined data entry in direct executable operation, kinda like the Parallax series does.
Hope you guys enjoy,
Feel free to write back, I'd be happy to help contribute to the community and believe this device would help many people out.
This way the users won't have to disassemble their Arduino units anymore. They can write to it with the ATmega328p Shield.
Then they can remove the newly programmed MCU from the Shield to put in circuit.
Thanks!
I also created some HEX2MCU software which loads in program and bootloader hex files, converts them over to firmware commands and then the Arduino programs the MCU on the shield based on those instructions that were converted from hex to firmware commands.
So far, I have 0% error in data transfer rate making this very efficient.