Apr
23
2010
Reverse Engineering a Cheap Arduino Programming Cable
By DW » 8 Comments
If you remember the badges from SoOnCon in Hamilton last year, you’ll remember that the Thinkhaus crew came up with a great minimal-Arduino design based on the LilyPad. You may also recall that we needed a USB-to-TTL serial cable to upload our own custom code to these badges, since slimmed-down Arduinos often omit the onboard USB chip to cut costs.
One solution is to use a $20 cable from FTDI, which we did for SoOnCon, sharing one cable among 8 makers, but I was hoping there was a cheaper approach. When I got back to Waterloo, a little googling turned up a number of DIY’ers who had converted cheap cellphone data cables into Arduino-programming cables. This post outlines some of the 10 hours I spent getting that working. As useful as this new $2.67 cable (shown above) is, I’m hoping that more useful is a description of the methodology of reverse engineering a simple hardware device. Read on for details…
More after the break…
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