I’ve been pondering how to use my USBtinyISP to program my Colorduino ever since I got it. The problem with the beta board is that the ICSP header is positioned so close to the adjacent connectors that it’s impossible to plug a cable into it. I tried using header extensions to raise it up, but then the matrix had to be removed when programming the board. I didn’t want to do a messy soldering job that would be hard to undo. Finally, I settled on using wire wrap to attach another header. The beauty of wire wrapping is that it’s easy to undo. Here’s what it looks like:
Note that it’s safer to route it through the top, rather than to the right, because it’s too easy to short it against the male header on the right side. After I took the photo, I also potted the bottom pins of the dangling header with hot melt glue to further protect from shorts. Here’s my USBtinyISP connected to it:
What’s convenient about using ICSP to program the Colorduino is that I’m working on a Processing sketch to communicate with it via the serial port from my PC. Since the serial port is no longer shared between the Arduino IDE and my Processing sketch, it’s a lot faster to work on both the Processing and Arduino sketches simultaneously.