Introduction: Supersimple Attiny Programmer

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About: I am a physician by trade. After a career in the pharmeceutical world I decided to take it a bit slower and do things I like. Other than my hobbies that involves grassroots medicine in S.E.&P Asia. I have buil…

After I was really fed up always making the MOSI, MISO, Reset, SCK, Vcc and Ground connection with wires in order to program an Attiny85/45/13, I bought an USBASP programmer (real cheap).
Didn't get that to work, always got the dreaded 'Yikes, invalid device signature' message, that is usually a sign of a bad connection. Couldnt quickly locate it, maybe a rotten cable, but I didnt want to lose more time so I put together a quick and simple Attiny programmer.

I know there are dozens of circuits and designs floating around on the internet, but I just never got around to actually making one, so if you are like me, this is just a little push to tell you to 'just do it' it takes maybe 10 minutes from scrap to programmer.

I got my inspiration from a Spanish site from a guy that inspired me to build my first Arduino, but when I checked there, the stripboard-illustrations of his programmer were gone.
No sweat, just simple to make one myself.
The idea is a little piece of stripboard that plugs in the necessary headers of the Arduino. A 20hole x 9 strips piece is enough, but I made that 22 holes, just to give a couple of small 'wings' to help me pull it out.
BOM
20x9 stripboard
male header 7 pins
male header 6 pins
2 LEDs
2 resistors 560-1k
1 electrolytic capacitor 10 uF (in fact I used a 33uF, that worked as well)
8 pins dil IC holder

The Arduino ISP offers 3 LEDs to keep track of status. I implemented 2: The heartbeat and the Error (D9 and D8). Adding the 'Programming' LED is a bit more of a hassle because that needs D7 which is just at the other side of the non standardized gap in the Arduino headers, But if you want you could add a slightly bend pin to slot into D7.
The board plugs in easily, but is not completely straight because of how the arduino headers line up, but it works great.

Just a word on the capacitor. In order to avoid that the Arduino will reset when the attiny program is uploaded, the reset pin must be kept high. there are two ways how that is usually done: a resistor (120 Ohm) to the Vcc or a capacitor (10uF) between earth and Reset. Both work well.
However, the capacitor is also the reason that you cannot upload the ArduinoISP program with the board inserted, so you have to pull it out. You could of course add a jumper to the board, or a small switch, to temporarily disconnect the capacitor

Important!!!
Make double sure and double check that you have not forgotten to make all of the necessary cuts in the stripboard. Check it after each cut, use a multimeter if necessary.
After you soldered it all up, check again that there are no stray connections or shorts. The reason for this is that you do not want to short any pins on your arduino or connect any pins to where they shouldn’t be connected. You do not want any of your Digital-Out pins to be connected to Ground when you pull them high.

Anyway, build it yesterday and works great. I have programmed more Attiny's in half a day than I did in my life before.

For people that are new to programming an Attiny: The steps are as follows.
Make sure you have an Attiny core installed (There are many, try here or here , you also may want to check here)
Remove the programming board and upload the 'ArduinoISP' program to your Arduino.
Insert the program board and load the desired Attiny sketch.
Choose the proper Attiny setting under 'Tools-Board'
Go to 'File-Upload Using Programmer' in older IDE-versions this might be just 'Upload'
You may want to check here or here for more information on the programming.
important is to know that even with a succesful programming, you will get two error messages:

Ignore two error messages:
"avrdude: please define PAGEL and BS2 signals in the configuration file for part ATtiny85".
just ignore those messages.
If you are perfectionist, you can solve those error messages by edit file avrdude.conf, found in

(windows) C:\Program Files (x86)\arduino-1.0.6\hardware\tools\avr\etc
(Ubuntu) Home\Arduino-1.06\hardware\tools
Find the word Attiny85 and go down a few lines up to:

chip_erase_delay = 4500;
and add below these lines:
# Added to eliminate the bug to build.
pagel = 0xB3;
bs2 = 0xB4;
Find this section lower down and add the highlighted code:
memory "lock"
size = 1;
write = "1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 x x x x x","x x x x x x x x 1 1 i i i i i i";
read = "0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0","0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 o o o o o o o o";
min_write_delay = 9000;
max_write_delay = 9000;
;
Thanks baelza.bubba for putting me on track for that. If you have trouble understanding, check the two pictures. Understand that you dont HAVE to alter the file, it will all work. The alteration is just to get rid of the error messages.

Just a tip: when I was programming Attiny's I used the setting for the 8MHz internal clock and found my timings to be far off. coincidence or not, it seemed they were a factor 8 off (slower). When I tried at 1 MHz, It all seemed OK again. This is caused by the following: The standard operating speed for the Attiny is 1Mhz, and it gets that by dividing the internal oscillator by 8. Where I presumed the 8MHz setting would set the proper fuses to tell the Attiny it shouldnt divide the internal oscillator anymore, it seems that it may not do that. The solution would be to first set the proper fuses by selecting 'burn bootloader' That doesnt burn the bootloader, but it does set the right fuses.

Just another tip: There are various Attiny cores and not all are full implementations. If you intend to use the 'OneWire' library, you may run into errors like :

/libraries/OneWire/OneWire.cpp:105: error: 'digitalPinToBitMask' was not declared in this scope
/libraries/OneWire/OneWire.cpp:106: error: 'digitalPinToPort' was not declared in this scope
/libraries/OneWire/OneWire.cpp:106: error: 'portInputRegister' was not declared in this scope

There is an easy fix for that:

• Locate and open OneWire.h
• Locate this section of code towards the top...

#if ARDUINO >= 100
#include "Arduino.h" // for delayMicroseconds, digitalPinToBitMask, etc
#else #include "WProgram.h" // for delayMicroseconds
#include "pins_arduino.h" // for digitalPinToBitMask, etc
#endif

• Change into:

#if ARDUINO >= 100
#include "Arduino.h" // for delayMicroseconds, digitalPinToBitMask, etc
#include "pins_arduino.h" // for digitalPinToBitMask, etc
#else #include "WProgram.h" // for delayMicroseconds
#include "pins_arduino.h" // for digitalPinToBitMask, etc
#endif

• Save and close OneWire.h

• No need to restart the Arduino IDE
The problem is not with the library but with the core. It is just easier to fix in the library

And yet another tip: If you are trying to use the Attiny with the LCD library from F. Malpertida, you may run in some error messages that have to do with the print.h and print.cpp files of the core.
These can be fixed. There are twopublications on how to do that. Useful info also here.

And another tip regarding the Attiny13
If you are programming the Attiny13 and you find the analogRead not working, then add "analogReference(0)" in the setup.