I’ve had a FTDI cable for a while for testing serial communications between my microprocessors and my computer and for that job, it works great. However, I recently grabbed a couple Ardweenies from Solarbotics and decided to use my FTDI cable to program them. The FTDI cable doesn’t have an automatic reset, so you have to push the reset button on the board at exactly the right time when trying to program it from your computer. This causes tons of frustration.
Oddly, a few days of experimenting with the arduinos, my cable got a short in it. While fixing the short, I was surprised to find out that the FTDI cable uses the same chip as the Sparkfun Programmer (which has automatic reset) so I went about modifying my cable to include this feature.
Modifying the cable is much easier said than done, but since I got it working, I figured I’d do a write-up on it in case anyone else wants to give it a shot.