Sunday, April 28, 2013

Review of Playduino One PTH DIY Kit

I purchased this simple DIY kit from eBay ( Item number:180977979792) for 10 usd. The kit do not include MCU, but I already have several Atmega328 chips and decided to try it. I found some online description for this product here. It Arduino Duemilanove compatible PCB with all DIP components, really easy to solder. Not from the newest versions of Arduino, but still useful. After the solder work was done the kit look like:



The PCB comes without FTDI chip. External CP2102 TTL module required for communication with software on the computer. But first, Atmega328 should be pre-flashed with bootloader. Because my MCU was blank I used USBasp programmer to upload the bootloader to Atmega. The board has ISP connector with MOSI, MISO, SCK, RST, VCC, GND pins. Follow this link for "How to upload bootloader". Arduino software reported some SCK synchronization warning after programming, but seems everything was successful and  bootloader was installed correctly. I connected FTDI module and tested the default LED blinking sketch.


I would recommend this DIY kit because of low price, but it require soldering and some firmware workaround. The drawback is that you need external TTL module, MCU and AVR programmer, but if you already have all of them, then it maybe good solution for cheap Arduino board.

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