Automating the R8C Starter Kit

We described the £10 ‘Tom Thumb’ R8C microcontroller starter kit in the February 2006 issue of Elektor Electronics. A disadvantage of this minimal system, in the author’s opinion, is that the programming procedure entails considerable manual intervention: ‘press Reset’, ‘press Mode’, ‘release Reset’, ‘release Mode’ and so on, involving both the PC and the microcontroller. It might also be possible for contact bounce to cause a button press to be registered several times: reason enough for the author to automate the process by souping up the system with a couple of extra components.