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Most of my electronics projects these days use micro-controller chips because they allow quite complicated circuits to be built with relatively few components.

My “favourite” micro-controller is the ATmega328. It has 28 pins, most of which can be used to connect input devices, such as switches, buttons, light sensors, temperature sensors, and so on or output devices, such as LEDs, displays, motors etc.

It’s a very versatile chip but sometimes the 28 pins is a bit “overkill”. The manufacturer of the ATmega328 makes a “family” of similar chips with 8, 14 and 20 pins in addition to the 28-pin ATmega328 but I was unable to program them – until now!

I made a stand alone programmer some time ago which was able to program 28-pin and 14-pin chips but I wanted to program the 8-pin chips as well so I made my “mini programmer”
which connects to the main programmer.