Attiny13 microcontroller development board

The task and the search for solutions

It’s time to study a lighter microcontroller than atmega328, which is located on Arduino boards. Arduina is good, but for very simple tasks it is very redundant. Its price is higher, dimensions are larger and consumption is also greater than the microcontrollers of the series, for example Attiny. An understanding has come that knowing one microcontroller is not enough, there are simple and complex tasks. It was decided to study Attiny13, it has been studied enough by other people and is suitable for my tasks.

Choosing a breadboard for the Attiny13 microcontroller

For experiments on the microcontroller, so as not to constantly get confused in the wires, I decided to start by looking for a debug board, with soldered buttons and LEDs. Such was found in China, the price for it was $ 4 apiece and 4 for shipping. You can order it if you are ready to wait and if you are satisfied with the functionality embedded in it. For many tasks, its potential should be enough, but I wanted a little more.

Wishes:

1. assign any leg of the chip as input or output
2. be able to expand the breadboard by adding what is needed, and if possible use more jumpers than a dupont wire

DIY breadboard

In my implementation using a jumper, you can connect a button or LED to any pin. Additionally, there are pull-up resistors of various ratings on top, you can use it to test the ADC, or to tighten the legs to plus, if you decide not to use INPUT_PULLUP for any reason.

The diagram shows the first version of the layout, later added the ability to connect an LED or button to any pin of the microcontroller using the jumper permutation. This last addition is not shown in the diagram, but everything is done simply by analogy.

Anything else

There is a USBasp programmer, but it needs an unsigned driver. For those who do not want to install such drivers or do not have the ability, they can successfully flash microcontrollers by SPI. SPI programmer can be made of arduino if you flash arduino with the appropriate firmware.

There is a good mark on the Internet that if you use arduino as a programmer, then you need to hang a capacitor on the pin reset so that the arduino itself is not reset during firmware.

Useful links

• ATtiny13A: режимы энергосбережения, фьюзы и программный UART
  http://www.count-zero.ru/2016/attiny13/

• На этом сайте автор пишет, что иногда проще использовать ATmega8, чем изгаляться с любой attiny.
  ATmega8: прошивка загрузчика Arduino через Arduino IDE, знакомство c AVRDUDE
  http://www.count-zero.ru/2014/avrdude/

• http://narodstream.ru/programmirovanie-mk-avr/