Monday, July 16, 2012

ZIF Socket Allows Programming of PICAXE Family

Lately I have been programming several PICAXEs for people due to my motorcycle gear position indicator project. It is a bit of a pain to insert and remove a PICAXE from my AXE091 dev board just to program a PICAXE. Plus, I often have a PICAXE already pushed into the dev board. Removing it with all the surrounding wires is not easy and depending on the state of the current project it could be harmful to the poor PICAXE I'm trying to program.  Basically, I needed a simple way to plug in a PICAXE and download code to it.  My solution: 
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You can see from the diagram in the picture, you plug the PICAXE microcontroller into the ZIF socket one way to program PICAXE-08/14 family devices. To program the PICAXE-18 family place the notch and pin 1 to the opposite side of the ZIF socket. The rig tests fine with all the PICAXE families mentioned.  
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I did solder female header rails adjacent to both sides of the ZIF to allow easy hook up of a servo, LED, etc.  However the point of the design was to create an small, tight, easy way to download code into a PICAXE and not create a development board.
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The cost was close to "free" since I already had a ZIF socket.  Labeled schematic follows (click to enlarge):
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