Microcontroller Basics - How to Transfer a Program into a Microcontroller chip

I hope you might have already constructed the SPI interface as explained in the previous tutorial, and now it’s time to ensure that our computer accepts the programmer that we need to integrate in between the PC and the MCU.

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We take a USBTinyISP unit available from Sparkfun, for linking the computer with the microcontroller.

We know that any computer operating system such as Windows will require drivers without which it would be useless to load anything into the computer, thus our programmer will need drivers in order to load into your computer.

Let’s peek into the procedures required for installing the drivers in your computer OS, here we take the example of Windows 7 OS with either 32-bit or 64-bit specs.

Open sparkfun.com and click on “pocket AVR programmer page”. The link can be readily visualized within the page.

Next, find ”Windows driver” under documents and simply click on it.

This will provide you with the pocketprog-driver.zip file in your computer.

Go to your computer, find the download location and just unzip the downloaded file into a folder.

In case your computer is a 64-bit OS, you need to follow a few more steps as given under, with a 32-bit OS, you may directly begin the installation from the unzipped file.



For a 64-bit follow these, for 32-bit simply ignore:

Google “libusb sourceforge” and click on this links latest version.

You would come across a few additional files, however you would be interested to find the bib file, that is: libusb-win32-bin-#.#.#.#.zip

Now, go and find this download location in your computer, unzip it and save it in one of the folders.

Into this folder, navigate over the bin folder, proceeding on to the amd64 folder.

You would see a couple of folders here as: ghcalled libusb0.dll and libusb0.sys.

You would want to rename these as: libusb0_x64.dll and libusb0_x64.sys.

Now you will need to copy the above files into pocketprog-driver folder, simply overwrite the files on the existing version.

To install the above drivers, the following method which is rather a non-conventional in its type would interest you:

It’s a “add legacy hardware” mode.

Click on “Start Menu”

Then proceed by right clicking on “computer”

Click on “Manage”, and finally click on “device manager”

Next, inside the menu, choose “Add Legacy Hardware”

Go on to press “next”, until the wizard get inserted

Following the instructions, click on “Install the hardware which you would need to select from an Advanced list” this will prompt the radio button icon into that particular selection. It’s actually a windows control button that would now appear like a tiny circle having a roundish blue filing inside.

Now simply click “Next”

This will show you “Show all Devices” menu which you will need to click.

After this proceed to click on the “Have Disk” Icon.

With the help of the “Browse” icon, go ahead to the location of pocketprog-driver folder. If the selection was correctly done by you, you would visualize the pocketprog.inf file placed in that particular folder.

Double click over this file and you would certainly witness the driver getting installed into your PC.



Over and Out!! Let’s get on with our next tutorial on the next page.

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