10-pin to 6-pin AVR ISP Adapter

This is a sequence of photos on how I made a 10-pin to 6-pin AVR ISP Adapter. All the credits are for Nard Awater who guided me in the construction (and in many
more electronics stuff) of this adapter.

One thing you should notice is that this adapter was made for a parallel programmer with 10-pin female header, so what you only need is a 10-pin male header, some cables, shrinktubing, and two strips of 3 pins each one.

Let's start!

 

The mapping I used was this:

10-pin Header	6-pin Adapter
1	4 (MOSI)
2	2 (VCC)
3	Not used
4	Not used
5	5 (RESET)
6	6 (GND)
7	3 (SCK)
8	6 (GND)
9	1 (MISO)
10	6 (GND)

Nard told me that I must be careful which kind of standard I use. Luckily, the one I used was ok. To test this out, you could probe with a continuity tester the ground of your 6-pin socket with the 10th pin (of course, if you are using the same parallel programmer than I do) of the programmer's chip.

With the above mapping in mind I proceeded to make it:

One thing I've done is glue the strips together with a special kind of glue made for plastics. You can ommit this step and only use the shrinktubing to tie them together. I preffer the glue, just in case the incredible Hulk try to programm my AVR:

The following approach was discarted. I thought that the phone line filter box would be good to albergate the adapter. Then I realized that it's to rough to use it, and it will make a big lever force and could break the ISP on the pcb:

After the strips are glued together, prepare the cables to be soldered and do the job. At this time you can forget about the shrinktubing, but be aware when connecting the other ends of the cable and remember to use the shrinktubing!

Then you can start joining the other ends:

This was the cable I made for the ground:

And this is how it looks on it:

And...we are done! just use the big shrinktube!:

Everything looks ok:

Ok, well, let's do it!:

...Nard to the rescue! Well, if you want to add a led to see the programming activity then DO NOT FORGET TO DO IT BEFORE SHRINKTUBING! Ok, so If you want to add a led and you already finished the job, then you must do what I did (actually, Nard told me). Cut the tubes, and put a led with a 330ohms resistor. The VCC of the 10-pin connected to one end of the resistor, the other end to the anhode, and the cathode to pin 3 of the 10-pin connector. Something like this:

In the picture above, you can't see the resistor. It's already on the tube, but you can see one end of the resistor going right and up to the left. That way it's near the pin3 and you cand put the led simply:

And now we are done!: