Program ATtiny 0-Series Chips with a Miniature UPDI Dongle

Thanks to their tiny size and improved capabilities, the ATtiny-0-Series of microcontrollers have been a delight for designers and DIYers looking for a microcontroller with the ease of use associated with the Arduino boards, but with a way smaller form factor associated with ATtiny microcontrollers. Along with the ATtiny-1-series, the ATtiny-0-Series microcontrollers were meant to serve as a modern replacement for other popular ATtiny chips like the ATtiny85 and ATtiny45. While they have been able to do these with incredible features one challenge users have had over time includes; difficulties in programming the chips, as, unlike the previous ATtiny chips, they use a not so popular programming protocol called UPDI in place of the ISP protocol used by the previous series.

To solve this, several programmers have developed various ways through which the Attiny-0-series can be programmed. One of them was discussed in one of our previous tutorials, but for today’s tutorial, we will look at the most elegant way we have seen so far; the UPDI Programming Stick developed by David Johnson-Davies.

This programmer is based on the Atmega328P and can really be said to be an Arduino Uno on USB. It uses the Atmega328P microcontroller as the UPDI programmer while the FT231 serves as the USB to UART converter facilitating data exchanges between the programmer and the computer. As mentioned above, the device can also be used as a limited Arduino Uno, for the reason that the digital pin 6 of the Atmega328P which is compatible with the pin 6 on an Arduino Uno, is broken out so it can be used for Arduino related acts.

While the programmer can be bought from different electronics component online stores, the maker in us would love to build our own and since the design is open-source we have all we need.

Thus for today’s tutorial, we will examine how you can build your own version of the UPDI Programmer stick.

Program ATtiny 0-Series Chips with a Miniature UPDI Dongle – [Link]

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