
If you burn the fuses such that the microprocessor uses an external 16MHz crystal for the clock, you can no longer program it without having that 16MHz crystal and associated capacitors connected to the oscillator pins. It contains a single zero insertion force (ZIF) socket and five 6 pin sockets wired for most variants of the microcontroller.Ī problem that I have found with AVR microcontrollers (particularly the ATmega328) is that they cannot be programmed without a clock of some kind. So this build allows you to easily program most AVR DIL packages. You can use a breadboard to hookup the output of the USBtinyISP to the AVR Microcontroller you want to program. Unfortunately, owing to the different IC packages, the pins vary. AVR Microcontrollers are programmed using 6 pins. On the PC side, you run a program called Avrdude.exe or it is run by the Arduino IDE when you select Tools -> Burn Bootloader. The USBtinyISP allows you to download the software from your PC via a USB cable and program the chip.

To program a blank AVR microcontroller, you need a special board such as the USBtinyISP programmer. However when you purchase a new AVR Microcontroller, it will be blank and you cannot use the Arduino IDE to program sketches for it. This is only possible because the AVR Microcontroller on the board has already been programmed with a special piece of software called a bootloader. The Digispark board which is an Arduino variant uses a ATtiny85 microcontroller and has only 5 IO pins.Īrduino boards (eg Uno, Mega, Digispark) load software from the Arduino IDE via the USB port. The less pins on a chip mean less IO ports. However AVR chips come in 8-Pin, 14-Pin, 20-Pin and 40-Pin packages as well. The one most Arduino users know is the 28 pin ATmega328 variant. Amtel AVR Microcontrollers come in a number of variants.
