Blog Entry

The ISP Breakout Board for Prototyping Your Electronic Circuit

February 25, 2013 by rwb, under Yet Another Tips.

In many projects presented in this blog I used the breadboard for prototyping and building the projects. Literally breadboard is mean a piece of wood (board) we usually use to cut the bread, this term later used by many of earlier electronics experimenters to descript the board they used to construct and connect all the electronics components on the piece of wood board. The breadboard has many advantages as it allow us to prototype the electronic design before going into the production and to reuse the electronics components for another project which of course will reduce the component’s cost especially for the electronics beginners.

When prototype a microcontroller based electronic circuit, we also need to be able to program the microcontroller easily, therefore to avoid using many jumper cables between the programmer and the breadboard circuit every time we want to program the microcontroller I used this following easy to build Atmel ISP breakout board as shown on this following picture:

The ISP breakout board is constructed on the 20×16 mm perforator board using one 6 pins right angle male header to connect to the breadboard and one 2×3 pins male header for the ISP programmer connection. Again I used a copper enameled wire to connect all the header pins. You could read this method on the “Quick and Efficiently Wiring Your Prototype Circuit Board” in this blog. Make sure you double check all the pins connection and next print the ISP breakout board labels and glue it on the ISP breakout board as shown on this following picture:

Now you are ready to use this ISP breakout board to program the Atmel Microcontroller based prototyping circuit. Make sure you always refer to the Atmel Microcontroller datasheet to correctly connect this ISP breakout board to your target microcontroller. The following table shows the ISP pins connection for some of the popular Atmel AVR Microcontrollers:

The following picture show the Atmel ISP breakout board is used to program the Atmel AVR ATmega168 microcontroller based project on the breadboard:

This small ISP breakout board has been very useful to me in prototyping most of the Atmel microcontroller based circuit ever since. Now you could also share the same pleasure by building this little and handy Atmel ISP breakout board by yourself.