Every possible connection

The Raspberry Pi does not really need an introduction: Linux plus some tinkering pins - who could possibly ask for more? It has all the features needed to create a flexible and powerful programming / debugging tool for microcontrollers. It can even run entire toolchains for cross-compiling for a wide variety of these µCs.

One tricky aspect, which is probably the main stumbling block if you’ve ever looked into trying out things with a 32-bit ARM-based µC, is how to get the software onto those chips. There are many ways, well-researched on this weblog and elsewhere, but they all have little quirks - from trouble with connecting everything together, to not being portable across Win/Mac/Lin, to requiring a special programmer - it quickly turns into a chicken-and-egg kind of adventure:

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE

Here is yet another setup, which requires nothing other than a working Raspberry Pi (to be called “RasPi” from now on) - of which there are millions by now. Best of all, it’ll work with any RasPi model (and probably most compatible alternatives), no matter how old or limited:

We’ll use nine pins on the RasPi’s header - all in the first 26 pins, i.e. present on all models:

Here is an example how these pins could be wired to a few female headers:

Below is a fully self-contained unit, hacked together from parts lying around here at JeeLabs. The tape keeps some unused wires from the 26-core flat cable out of harm’s way:

There’s a small USB power bank (based on the very common 18650 LiPo cell) and in this case also a WiFi dongle, plugged into the only USB port available on this older RasPi 1, model A. Any SD card of at least 2 GB will do, and it’s all meant to be used via SSH, i.e. via the cmd-line.

In the above setup, you can also see a 470 µF capacitor between +5V and GND, and another one of 47 µF between +3.3V and GND, because old RasPi’s are sensitive to power fluctuations. Without them, plugging a µC board into any of the headers can trip it up and reset the RasPi.

For JeeNode Zero boards, with a FTDI pinout including DTR & RTS, we can plug in as follows:

To connect a JNZ for programming over SWD, this will work (note the extra RESET wire):

For a HyTiny F103 board, we need to use its dedicated header (again with extra RESET wire):

And lastly, the Blue Pill board has its own header (yes, it too needs the RESET wire):

The RESET wire is not always needed for programming over SWD. It depends on whether the code running on the µC has disabled SWD - when SWD is disabled, the only way to get control back is to connect RESET. Asserting this signal keeps the µC in reset during programming.

Coming next: setting up the software to turn this RasPi into a general-purpose µC tool…