iCufflinks halloween project

[brucethehoon]

I'm making a pendant that will look like the center button on an xbox 360 controller. I've just finished it in Sketchup, and will print it on my Replicator (1) tonight!

A couple weeks back, I submitted an order to get 9 iCufflink boards made at OSH Park (for less than $10.... insane) and they arrived yesterday. I already have all my Digikey parts including three different hues of Green LED.

NOW! After going through the surely hell I'm going to submit myself to to get that absurdly small package all soldered (I usually cut my own stencils on a vinyl cutter, but this is just too small, and my normal laser cutting stencil maker wants nothing to do with it!), I will need to get this sucker programmed.

I ASSUME, hopefully correctly, that the exposed pads on the top of the board will allow me to program it with a USBASP or similar ISP. Assuming I'm correct, shall I just rig up some pogo plugs on that? Assuming I'm not, I'll just have to punt and go nuts with very small wire and deadbug a tiny13 I have laying around in there.

The actual questions:
1. Am I right about the pads?
2. Is this a 3.3v only or is it 5v tolerant (for programming purposes)

Is there anything else I'm missing? Thanks!

[brucethehoon]

I hate to bump, but am getting ready to solder one of these suckers up. Hopefully I'm on the right track!

[brucethehoon]

Just about the dumbest thing I can think of is getting actually upset while not getting free support for something I didn't buy, but I was hoping to get SOME answer here.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
I've determined that I likely need to use a recent AVR programmer capable of TPI programming, and that I will use 5 of the 6 exposed pads. When connecting the board up to an AVRISPMKII, and attempting to program through AVR Studio, I get "Target appears to have lost power..." Given that the avrispmkii doesn't power the board, I applied 5v to the vcc and tried again only to have the same result.

[brucethehoon]

Well lets go ahead and have a mod kill this thread. I've been told by Adafruit that they won't tell me what programmer / software they use to program these units. I'm going to just scramble and do it from scratch from a tiny25. If anyone sees this before the thread is closed, let me know if you want the boards. I have 7 of them.

[adafruit]

Well lets go ahead and have a mod kill this thread. I've been told by Adafruit that they won't tell me what programmer / software they use to program these units. I'm going to just scramble and do it from scratch from a tiny25. If anyone sees this before the thread is closed, let me know if you want the boards. I have 7 of them.

hiya!

where did we say that? you had asked for "I'd like to offer to pay for support" (we do not offer that at this time).

we also said
=====================
"hiya! we're very excited, it sounds like an awesome project - we just do not have any tutorials or resources on this, we use a TPI AVR programmer. please check the schematics and the data sheet for the chip for programming details. hope this helps! thanks,
adafruit support, phil"
=====================

thanks,
adafruit support, phil

[brucethehoon]

I apologize for the confusion. My request had ended with:

Can anyone tell me how you all do your programming? I'll simply buy whatever tools you use and be on my way! Please let me know what I can do to get help with this right away. I'm desperately trying to get this done by Saturday!

Your ENTIRE reply was:

Hi!

Thanks for the note and interest in Adafruit. We do not provide engineering or consulting services at this time, however due to demand for this, we created a free jobs boards that has worked out for many people - from top businesses to makers who wish to showcase their skills.

http://www.adafruit.com/jobs/

We also have our customer forums (general section) that you're free to check out as well:
http://www.adafruit.com/forums/

Thank you again!
Adafruit support

While writing a reply to you, I had gotten this far:
I'm grateful for the response and won't keep acting like a needy teenager. I've read through AVR918, and seen the design for the mega324 based TPI programmer. If you're saying you use a custom programmer with pogo pins based on the reference design, I'll probably be better off just bitbanging it wi...

and while writing this very post, I got a call from Phil who clarified that they are (probably) using the reference design from AVR918. Not a problem If I can get any of my other programmers working on it in the next few hours, great. Otherwise, I'll move on.

Kudos as usual to Adafruit for being abnormally on top of support. It's nearly supernatural to be writing a post on a forum only to see an after hours call from NY coming in...

[adafruit]

totally cool, it was nice chatting! sorry for any email issues!

[brucethehoon]

Thanks again. It's worth noting that the makefile on github specifies the AVRISP MK II. Perhaps you've had success with that?