0 ATMega8 Posted by Jake-san | at 7:09 AM

I made a parallel port programmer for a ATMega8-16PU (16MHz DIL package) micro controller I had lying around for a while. I used about an hour making a nice looking dongle with a DB9-DB25 case to house the 4 resistors required for the programmer (I made the stk200 variation with 330 ohm resistors). But imagine my surprise when I took the dongle in my hand and went around the computer case to connect it.

No LPT port, WTF?! How did I miss that one? I just recently changed my mobo since the old one kinda broke, and now the only COM-port and LPT-port exist only as a header on the mobo and not in the backplane. Great.

I managed to find from work a printer extension cable that had 2 DB25 connectors connected via ribbon cable which I clipped from the male end and replaced the connector with a female header to plug to the mobo.

I had a simple prototype board housing the micro controller, where I plugged the programmer and made connections to 1 red led for power indicator and another one for a port to indicate successful programming. I used some ready made blink program pulled from some website with its make-file (I used WinAVR as the programming environment since the programmer was said to be supported by it very easily). I compiled once, tried to program the mega8. But the make-file still needed some tweaking since it was made to address /dev/ port under linux, which I changed to LPT1 as the debug info box in WinAVR suggested. Next program try worked perfectly, the program went to the mega8 and the led I put on one of the ports started to blink like expected.

That's it for now, more to follow...