Frienduino

Description

The Frienduino is an Arduino clone you can make for a friend once you have any kind of Arduino and some soldering skill. The board is easy to make (single sided) and easy to solder (only through hole components). It has everything to get started yet it is cheap and simple because it saves on stuff the novice doesn't need (separate power supply and 3.3V regulator).

IMHO, what made the Arduino so popular is its USB connectivity. This lowers the entry barrier to near zero. No messing around with programmers, no legacy serial port required. Alas, most of the many many Arduino clones out there lack this key feature. I guess the reason for this is that, until now, all USB to serial adapters were not available as a through hole component, thus discouraging the novice to build a "true to the spirit" clone on their own.

Project Logs

Collapse

Ready and tested
jgeisler0303 • 06/06/2015 at 19:27 • 0 comments

I have now had a first batch of PCBs made at Seeedstudio. The Gerbers are in the repo @github. And here is a ready to order Seeedstudio project.
Flashing of the PIC has now become even more easy with the special low voltage programming version of ardpicprog.
Also added Windows driver .inf file for the USB virtual serial port supplied by the PIC.

View project log

Discussions

zoobab wrote 04/09/2018 at 11:04

Problem is the USB chip you use requires (a PIC in this case) a non-free compiler. I would replace it with a ch340g which is also quite easy to solder.

Are you sure? yes | no

Stephen Covrig wrote 04/17/2023 at 22:04

check this out, you can program the PIC with an Arduino

https://github.com/jgeisler0303/ardpicprog

Are you sure? yes | no

Frienduino

Become a Hackaday.io member

Just one more thing

Description

Components

Project Logs Collapse

Ready and tested

Enjoy this project?

Discussions

Become a Hackaday.io Member

Does this project spark your interest?

Report project as inappropriate

Send message

Remove Member

Project Logs

Collapse