Protostack has released a new and improved version of it’s 28-pin development board. It’s priced at $9.60 and includes a number of welcome changes from the one I reviewed here in a previous post.

Read on to see what’s changed….

Ok, so what’s changed? Well, have a look at the image of the board below.

Bare View of Board (No Components Soldered.) Click image to view a full sized version of this image.

One welcome revision is the clearer labelling of the positive and negative power rails. They are now labeled with the more intuitive + and – symbols for positive and negative, respectively.

Also, the 6-pin ISP connector has changed from a single 6 row arrangement to a 3×2 arrangement (as shown in Image 2, below.)

Image2: ISP 6 pin Header Revisions. Click on the image to view a full-sized version

There’s also space on this revision of the board for an integrated, voltage-regulated power supply circuit. So if you need a built-in 5v or 3.3v power supply you won’t have to mess about building one of your own and finding somewhere to attach it to the power rails!  The only criticism I can think of with this feature is that there’s no space for a diode. This would offer more protection against damaging the Microcontroller (and other sensitive components) if you accidentally mixed up your positive and negative by, for example, connecting up a battery the wrong way round.

As far as connecting a power supply to the board is concerned, you have two options: either a normal 2-pin connector, or a barrel connector (which allows you to use any run-of-the-mill  power adaptor as a power source) can be used  in order to supply power to the board. You can see where both types of connector can be fitted to the board in images 3 and 4, below.

Image 3: Power Supply Circuit (Without Barrel Connector) Click on image for a full-sized version.

Image 4: Power Supply circuit (With Barrel Connector) Click on image for a full-sized version

Overall, this revision of the board looks a lot more beginner friendly that the one I previously reviewed here in July. The clearly marked power rails (with the familiar + and - symbols) and the integrated power supply make it one of the best prototyping boards out there for a beginner hobbyist in my opinion.

If you need more info on this development board then a datasheet and users’ guide are available from Protostack, in PDF format.

Related posts:

1. Review of ATMEGA8 Dev Kit
2. Simple LAN Controlled Stereo Audio Switch
3. Arduino-based Talking & Remote Thermometer

The guys over at HintShop have published a tutorial on using a bus pirate as an In-Circuit Programmer to flash firmware to an AVR Microcontroller using SPI.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, they also include instructions showing how multiple Mircocontrollers can be flashed by one Bus Pirate on the same board, in their tutorial! Is there anything this little gadget can’t do?

Related posts:

1. Adventures with the Bus Pirate
2. Handy Link: Using the AVR EEPROM in GCC-AVR
3. Handy Link: Bitwise Operator Video Tutorial

EEPROM memory can be extremely useful in Microcontroller projects, either as a fail-safe mechanism (to stores the state of your outputs so you can restore them if power is lost) or as a non-volatile storage area for data gathered via sensors.

This tutorial from AVR Freaks explains how to read from and write to EEPROM memory using AVR-GCC. Hope its useful to someone.

Related posts:

1. Handy Link From tehnikservice: TV EEPROM Dumps
2. Handy Link: Programing an AVR with a Bus Pirate
3. Handy Link: Bitwise Operator Video Tutorial