Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Handmade Arduino

When I first read about Arduino, I liked how compact it is, and how much processing power I can get. Also I loved the library and the idea of standard pins. I decided to buy a Mini-Arduino to play with. It costs me 160 L.E. in Egypt, that is about 27 USD. I decided to buy an ATMega 328 chip and try to imitate the board. I bought a crystal and couple of ceramic capacitors and some resistors, and started to build up an identical circuit.


Circuit Diagram using Fritzing 






My Actual Circuit identical to the diagram


 [extra wires you can see connected to Arduino are for AVR programming]



The end result is using ATMEGA-326 alone with nothing connecting to it except a resistor in the reset pin.

to make sure that they run at the same speed I developed a simple application that blinks the LED on a certain rate, and I uploaded the application to both chips using AVR. LEDs started to blink on the same rate.


Application Source Code



The good side is that the handmade version costed me only 40 L.E. which 6.67 USD only.
Application can be downloaded from here.

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