ATtiny84 Development Board

JNµ-alike

 This little board was inspired by a series of articles at JeeLabs describing how to program a JNµ from Arduino-1.5. (I tweaked a couple of values in its boards.txt but otherwise it's as described there.)

Background: since the ATtiny has no bootloader support, it can't be programmed with an FTDI cable but requires an ISP (e.g., an Arduino running the ArduinoISP example) to upload sketches to it over SPI, via avrdude (as seen below). The latest version of the Arduino IDE now supports this from within the IDE itself.

Programming it.

However I chose to add an FTDI connector because the authors of the arduino-tiny core had cunningly added a transmit-only serial emulation (on pin PB0 on the ATtiny84). (While a SoftwareSerial library which can also receive data exists, it's not yet supported on IDE 1.5.2. However I added future support for it anyway by wiring the receive line to PB1.)

Board layout

But wait, there's more! This fine article points out an alternative to ArduinoISP, which can also act as a serial relay: TinyISP. It provides two ways of doing this: by relaying SoftwareSerial and a (more robust) alternative called Knock-Bang. Each of these methods uses the SPI lines so no extra connector is required. This allows programming an ATtiny in almost the same way as an Arduino --- except you need an Arduino to act as a serial port for it!