A Design of Rechargeable In-Circuit Serial Programmer for Industrial Embedded Systems

Efficient industrial manual assembly lines provide high-quality products. Reliable portable assistive tools help workers finish manufacturing tasks efficiently. The Microchip AVR family of 8-bit microcontrollers is widely used in electronic products, which includes the AT, ATtiny, ATmega, and ATxmega subfamilies. This paper proposes a design of a reliable rechargeable Microchip AVR In-Circuit Serial Programmer for programming Microchip AVR AT, ATtiny, and ATmega microcontrollers deploying the Programmer-To-Go functionality. It uniquely features a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery, automatic selection of programming speed up to 4MHz, 3V-5V programming support, a microSD card that stores the firmware files required for programming, and an attached monochrome LCD that enables reliable ad-hoc programming. It supports Flash and EEPROM memories, Fuses, and Lock Bits reading, writing, verifying, and erasing based on the Microchip AVR STK500 communication protocol. Experimental work was conducted on the Arduino UNO development board. The results proved efficient programming (writing) time of 3s and 5s for 5KB and 20KB .hex files, and reading time of 5s and 7s of the same .hex files.