[avr-chat] minimal target board with an ISP header?

[Joe Strout]

Our local robot club is tinkering with a club bot based on the  
ATmega168.  We want a decent solderless breadboard area for mucking  
about with sensor & effector circuitry, but the bots are small, and  
the 28-pin AVR chip plus another six rows for connecting the ISP  
doesn't leave a lot of room for much else.

So, we've kicked around the idea of moving the AVR chip off the  
breadboard onto its own little board, ideally one that would bring its  
pins out to a 2x14 female header that we could position next to the  
breadboard, so as to run breadboard wires between them.

But for this application we really need to minimize size and cost.   
The ideal carrier board would provide the chip socket, 20 MHz  
oscillator, female header, and a 6-pin ISP header, and that's about  
it.  Maybe voltage regulation could live there too, but I also  
wouldn't mind keeping that separate.

Just to show I've done some homework, I've found Evil Mad Scientist's  
article on minimal target boards:
   <http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/avrtargetboards>

which does a good job of showing how to make your own, but as this is  
a kit we'd rather buy a board off the shelf.  I found Lady Ada's  
musings:
   <http://www.ladyada.net/rant/2007/08/idea-solderless-breadboard-arduino-clone/ 
>

though it's a little over-featured for our application.  So's the BBB:
   <http://moderndevice.com/>

Now, the RBBB is more like it, but lacks the programming header, and  
doesn't bring the pins all out to one side (which we would prefer so  
that breadboard wires don't have to stretch over the chip):
   <http://moderndevice.com/RBBB_revB.shtml> and <http://wulfden.org/freeduino/freeduino.shtml 
>

Any recommendations of other minimal boards we should consider?

Thanks,
- Joe