Not much to show for today's work, but sometimes coming up with how to do something is harder than actually doing it. Or so I tell myself. :)

I've decided I want to forego using the Arduino IDE. The ease of use is great, but I really miss having a debugger to use. Not that I've had anything I've needed to debug yet, but I'm sure I will soon. I'll continue to use an Arduino board, but I'll use Atmel Studio along with and Atmel JTAGICE mkII for programming and debugging.

So, towards that goal, I need to modify an Arduino. I ordered a few VISduino boards off of eBay from China. These are very inexpensive (~$5) boards that are similar to an Arduino UNO. I'll need to both program over the Arduino bootloader and unsolder a capacitor to use these with the JTAGEICE, so I wanted to leave my 'real' Arduino board intact. The VISduino boards arrived a few days ago. On one the crystal for the CH340G USB to serial chip had come loose (bad solder joint?), but I was able to resolder that easily. Both were programmed initially with the Blink program, and I was able to confirm that I could program my own code.

These are the instructions I'm going to generally follow for using the JTAGICE. The first step is to unsolder the capacitor that is attached between the DTR pin of the USB to serial convertor and the reset line. Looking at the board along with a pinout of the ATmega328 as well as the CH340G pinout, it looks like the capacitor 'squared' in red below is the capacitor to remove. I didn't get to that today, but perhaps tomorrow.

I did upload the example code mentioned in the last log using the u8glib library to this board to make sure it works with my setup before I start modifying it. It looked pretty much like the photo from last time, but with a yellow board underneath instead of a blue one. The breadboard shield sure makes it easy to swap things around.