MiniPin II is a smaller brother of MegaPin. Smaller, but still very user friendly and versatile development board, where programs for AVRs may be tested and evaluated. Connecting your programmer to the MiniPin II board.

When connecting your programmer to the MiniPin II board, be sure that you connect the programmer’s socket to the socket labelled “PROGGY”, as shown in Figure1. If you don’t own a Proggy programmer, make sure that you connect it’s signals to the MiniPin II board, as follows:

The MiniPin II board is powered by the programmer and it has a 250 mA fuse in series with the Vcc power line, to protect your PC’s USB port in case you have a short-circuit on your MiniPin II extension board.

Programming AVRs in MiniPin II

MiniPin II can program AVR microcontrollers that are mounted on the MiniPin II board itself - just mount your AVR chip in the appropriate socket, connect your programmer to MiniPin II and your AVR chip is ready for programming.

ISP programming from within AVR Studio 4

Mount your AVR microcontroller in the appropriate socket and click the AVR icon from within the AVR Studio 4 program (Figure2). Using the Main tab, select the microcontroller that you want to program (Figure 3).

To insure that communication is OK, and that you have selected the correct microcontroller, press the Read Signature button. If the read signature corresponds to the microcontroller you are programming, then you may proceed with programming. If the signature doesn’t match, then select the correct microcontroller from the list. If the program can’t even read the microcontroller’s signature, then there is something wrong with either the microcontroller, or some connections on the MiniPin II board are wrong (i.e. remove load from PortB).

ISP programming from within Bascom-AVR

Mount your AVR microcontroller in an appropriate socket, and within Bascom-AVR select Options/Programmer. A window like that shown in Figure 4 will pop-up.In the Programmer window, select STK500 (requires stk500.exe), and set COM-port to the same COM port number as seen in the Device Manager program (see the full description regarding this subject in the MegaPin chapter). Then double-click the folder icon (to the right of the STK500 EXE window) and select the path to your STK500.exe file (which is usually the same as that shown in Figure 4). Set the Baud rate to 57,600. Click OK and your Bascom-AVR settings are all done.

MiniPin II development board

2012_AVR_UK_107

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