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Assembling the Freeduino Board KIT

Assembling the ArduinoTM Diecimila Compatible Freeduino Board

SCHEMATICS (click on images to enlarge)

The Arduino diecimila compatible Freeduino board is a special version of the USB diecimila board designed by the Freeduino
team using all through-hole components (except FT232RL chip), for easy assembly. The board was designed by Bill
Westfield of the Freeduino team.

The latest board is v1.20 which schematic is exactly the same as v1.19.1. v1.20 assembles exactly the same as v1.19.1,
except for the F1 PTC resettable fuse.

First, unpack the kit

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and start with the PCB. The Freeduino board comes with the FT232RL chip and PTC fuse pre-soldered (v1.19.1 only),
eliminating the most difficult task in the assembly process of the Freeduino board.

First assemble the USB portion of the board.

Identify and separate the following components:

R8 1Kohm resistor (RLED just below the power LED)

C13 4.7uF capacitor
LED 3mm green LED
C8, C10 100nF ceramic capacitor
C4 10nF ceramic capacitor
X1 USB B PCB jack
SV1 3 pin male header
SHUNT Black shunt
F1 PTC resettable fuse (pre-soldered on v1.19.1)

Solder the parts to the board, in any order. This completes the USB portion of the schematic.

Board V1.19.1: the F1 PTC resettable fuse is the blue rectangle marked LF050 and it is pre-soldered in the PCB.

Board V1.20: the F1 PTC resettable fuse is a through-hole component that looks very similar to a ceramic capacitor, but has
markings like XF050. It must be soldered on F1.

This is how the PTC fuse for Board V1.20 looks like:

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And it must be soldered in F1:

Plug the small shunt in SV1, shorting central pin and the top pin (USB). Install the FTDI drivers that are installed under the
Arduino0009 or Arduino0010 directory. Connect the board to a Mac or PC. The LED in the board lights up and in windows
you will hear a beep, indicating that windows identified an USB device. Unplug the USB connector from the board to
continue soldering the rest of the components.

After testing the USB interface, you can continue soldering the rest of the components, in any order you like. I prefer to
complete the power portion of the schematic using the following parts:

DC1 DC power jack 2.1 mm barrel type

D1 1N4004 diode

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C5,
100nF ceramic capacitor
C12
100uF electrolytic capacitor (marked 200uF on the
C6
board)
C7 47uF electrolytic capacitor
IC2 7805 5V positive voltage regulator

Move the shunt in SV1 to short the central pin and the bottom pin (EXT). This is the indication that the external power
supply will be used, instead of USB. Plug a wall plug voltage regulator (+7V to +12V). The LED lights up, indicating that the
Power supply is working.

The kit can include a ceramic oscillator (orange component with 3 legs) or a crystal plus 2 x 22pF ceramic capacitors.Picture
of the installed ceramic oscillator:

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Picture of the installed crystal and 22pF ceramic capacitors:

Solder the rest of the components:

R1 10 Kohm resistor
R11, R12 1 Kohm resistor
CRS 100nF ceramic capacitor
13, RX, TX 3mm LED
R7, R9, R10 1Kohm resistors (RLED)

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Now solder the headers and sockets:

ICSP 2×3 pin male header

RESET reset switch
POWER, Analog In 2 x 6-pin female header
Digital 2 x 8-pin female header
ATMEGA168 28-pin DIP socket

Pay special attention to the alignment of the female headers.

And finally install the ATMEGA168 MCU.

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The board is ready to be used. Start Arduino0009 and load the BLINK sketch from the examples directory. Verify that
ATMEGA168 is selected in Tools –> Microcontroller (MCU). Select the COM port number corresponding to the USB serial
interface. If the port number is high (not in the 1-10 range), then you need to change it using Device Manager (in windows)
to use a lower number. Press the “Upload to I/O board” button in Arduino and the board should autoreset and complete the
programming. If you selected correctly the BLINK sketch, the LED “L” must start blinking once every 2 second (0.5Hz).If
you use the new Arduino0010, you don’t need to worry about the COM port number being higher than 10 in Windows
environment. In previous releases, COM port number needed to be 10 or lower. With Arduino0010, I have tested COM port
numbers up to 36 and it is recognized perfectly.

http://www.nkcelectronics.com/arduino.html
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Freeduino/Arduino. You can follow any responses to this entry
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One Response to “Assembling the Freeduino Board KIT”

1. glt Says:
May 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

Very nice kit and easy to build. I’ve added a switch to select the power in my kit. You can see a picture here:
http://hifiduino.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-modules-together.html

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