Category Archives: AVR

Adding a UART Interface to a USB Relay Board

This Chinese “8-Channel USB Relay Board” requires a 12V power supply, and it’s also supposed to plug into the PC for convenient software control. But there was nothing convenient about the software, and I wanted it to work directly with Arduino and other MCUs anyway. Here’s how I replaced the USB interface with a basic UART.

USB Relay Board Hack Closeup
USB Relay Board Hack Closeup

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Programming AVR Microcontrollers With Linux (The Relatively Easy Way)

After playing with the Arduino for a certain period, you may feel an urge to move forward to stand-alone microcontrollers. The official way to program AVR MCUs is with the Atmel Studio IDE and an Atmel programmer/debugger, such as Atmel-ICE. But Atmel Studio is only for Windows, and the programmers are pretty expensive. Here’s an alternative.

A cheap AVR programmer, suitable for Linux too
A cheap AVR programmer, suitable for Linux too

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