Minimal Arduino on a protoboard

Inspired by Todd’s minimal Arduino on a breadboard I made a slightly more advanced version on a protoboard piece. I wanted an ISP port for bootloader upload, an FTDI port for communication, auto reset for program upload from Arduino IDE, and a LED to see that it is working properly.

The end result turned out something like this:

Minimal Arduino on protoboard

Avrdude has been able to talk to it through my AVRISP MkII, and I have been able to upload programs to it using the Arduino IDE, but it does not work every time, and I am not yet sure why.

As you see it could easily be made even smaller, but that was not my primary goal.

I have been working with computers for almost 30 years now, mostly as a hobby, at times professionally, but electronics has been something I always wanted to learn more about but never did. This might explain any faults in my design, anything leading to the sporadic success of getting this little thing to do what I want it to.

I do not know how to make an image that I can include here from Eagle, but schematics (in Eagle format and as a pdf document) are included at the end of this post. Just for fun I tried to hide some elements of the design, the pull up resistor for the reset line is hidden under the IC socket, as is a connection from GND to GND. Some other wires are on the back of the board, done with wire wrap wire, also mostly for fun since I have no idea what it might do for the circuit per se.

Unchipped minimal Arduino on protoboard

Back of minimal Arduino on protoboard

Here is what it looks like on the back, and front without the chip. It was not made for being easy to understand, so please have a look at the schematics instead. Most of it it straight from Todd’s post, I added a capacitor and a LED, and the two physical headers.

Edit: Sorry, the schematics I published yesterday were wrong. The reset pin should have a pullup resistor to Vcc, not pulldown to GND. It was connected the right way on my board, but the schematics were wrong. This one should be correct, I hope:

JArdumino-v0.2 schematics pdf

JArdumino-v0.2 schematics, Eagle file

Technorati Tags: protoboard, Arduino, Avrdude, AVRISP