Build Piconomic Atmega128 development board by yourself

Earlier I have written about Piconomic learning course and its nice development board they provide. You can purchase the board if you are from a South Africa internationally for $49.99 + $9.37 airmail shipping with a tracking number, which takes 2-4 weeks, depending on custom delays. Of course there is good opportunity to build this board by yourself. They allow to build a development board for free only for personal use by using their Protel 99 SE project files. So I decided to build one and now it is standing on my table and blinking blue led.

First of all I have ordered to make PCB by using milling-drilling plotter. Of course I could make board by myself, but i wanted to save some time and nerves in case of errors. After one week my board was shipped to me:

The I bought all parts needed. Just one thing that didn’t go well was that I couldn’t get capacitors and resistors in SMD packages 0603, so I used 0805 lied on side.

It doesn’t look very OK but works. Presently I have checked the Piconomic project logs and found out that they improved the board layout files by exchanging all 0603 SMD parts to 0805, but it was too late for me as my board was already manufactured.

For you who will decide to build one it will be easier.

As most of parts was easy to get, I soldered the board:

Compare to original version:

Not too bad. And it cost me about 40$ (I didn’t put data flash memory yet).

I have written small blue LED blink routine here – first program to make sure development board works OK. Download it here.