Tuesday, October 11, 2011

FTDI and AVR cables

Here's a quick brain dump of the differences between FTDI and AVR programming cables.

  • Arduino things use the FTDI adapter.  FTDI is basically a serial/usb converter. 
  • FTDI is a company, their main product is a serial/usb chip.
  • The Arduino boot loader has code to handle the ftdi loading process.
  • Shown is the Solarbotics FTDI basic breakout.

  • The KK Board is more hard-core, non-arduino, "pure" atmel.
  • AVR programmer is used to "flash" the on-board chip memory, like writing an eprom.
  • If you want to take an atmel chip and make it into an arduino chip, you would use an AVR programmer and flash the arduino boot loader.
  • Likewise, you use an AVR programmer to flash the kkboard software onto the atmel chip.
  • Daddy87 has a great tutorial here.

  • "Name brand" AVR programmers are, ironically, more expensive than the HK KKboard .
  • But, lots of cheap vendors on ebay, all based on the open-source hardware design of Thomas Fischl:  http://www.fischl.de/usbasp
  • This one is from ProtoStack.

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