Arduino Pro Mini ICSP and FTDI Programming Board

This shield is used to flash my Arduino Pro Mini with OptiBoot bootloader and to upload sketch to it. Optiboot is less Flash consuming than classic one.

Also, for 3V3 at 8MHz devices, upload at 57600 is slow, so I'm using 250KBPS upload. You can see here why and how to. So, I can upload faster and more than that, Optiboot is using 0.5K of flash instead of 2K, it's a double win configuration, especially with huge sketch like LoraWan device with LMIC stack for my Mini LORA Board.

Features

• ICSP 6 pins connector
• FTDI 6 pins connector
• Power LED
• Reset button

Got V1.0 Boards from PCBs.io. I tested them, all is fine

Detailed Description

Nothing special to say, it's just some wiring, ICSP pins for programming (Power+SPI+Reset), FTDI (Power+Reset+RX+TX) for flashing and a LED to power the board (see if ICSP connector is fitted with good pining)

I'm using 2 PCB boards stacked with pogo pins and this avoid soldering any headers to the Mini Boards.

Schematics

Click on image to zoom

Boards

Top

Bottom

You can order PCB at PCBs.io. PCBs.io give me reward when you order my designed boards from their site. This is pretty good, because I can use these rewards to create and design new boards and order boards for a discounted price and share new boards. So if you don't care about PCB manufacturer please use PCBs.io.

Assembled boards (V1.0)

Populated

With Arduino Pro Mini on it

Bootloaders

I've compiled some bootloaders for you, use the one you prefer, I'm using:

• optiboot_flash_atmega328p_250000_8MHZ.hex (250KBPS) on 3V3 8MHz Mini
• optiboot_flash_atmega328p_250000_16MHZ.hex on 5V 16MHz Mini

I tested the 1MB ones, works fine also, here below the configuration of Fuses and Lockbit I'm using.

Fuse configuration

Lockbit

License

If you want to do commercial stuff with this project, please contact CH2i company so we can organize an simple agreement.

Misc

See news and other projects on my blog