ATmega programming board

Recently I've been playing with some projects that required more IO pins than the ATtiny has to offer. I bought a few ATmega8's from ebay and have about 3 of them installed in various breadboards at the moment. All the wiring was getting very frustrating, so I decided to make another programming board to reduce the clutter and to make my life a bit easier.

The process was almost identical to that for the ATtiny header board. There are only two real differences: 1) this is a board designed to fit the ATmega8 AVR chip so it has a 28 pin DIP socket and 2) I used a bad purchase (wide 28 pin dip socket) as the female headers for wiring up to the breadboard projects.

The wiring is practically the same as the ATtiny board. If you've ever wired an ATmega to a breadboard (or to anything else) you'll easily be able to work this out. There's more room to maneuver with the larger 28 pin board as well, which was nice.

Here's the 'bad purchase':

I mistakenly bought a few of these wide 28 pin sockets (as part of another allelectronics purchase). These have been sitting in a drawer all but forgotten. I noticed them whilst retrieving the narrow 28-pin socket for this board and figured these would be useful as female header rows if I just chopped them in half. It turns out they fit really well & look pretty good too.