How to Program a LilyPad Without FTDI Converter

Hello everyone! In this article I will show how to program the Arduino LilyPad without the FTDI converter.

Arduino LilyPad is one of the many Arduino microcontroller family, but with a feature that makes it unique.

The LilyPad board, in fact, can be sewn onto fabric using a common thread in stainless steel.

The low price of only 19 € makes this card very useful to be able to add interactivity and technology to our clothes, shoes, bags, hats and much more.

In this guide we will see how to program our LilyPad without using the FTDI converter that would be worth to buy together.

Our board looks like this:

This however is the pinout, ie the scheme that shows all the LilyPad PIN.

The material we will need is:

- Arduino UNO (NOT SMD)

- LilyPad Arduino

- 5x Jumpers Male - Female

- USB cable

First of all we will have to remove the ATMEGA328 UNO from 'Arduino using a flat screwdriver or an integrated extractor:

Once extracted the microcontroller pass to mount the circuit according to the following scheme:

Just finished editing the circuit connect the USB cable Arduino UNO and let's move on PC more precisely in the Arduino IDE.

In the tab "Tools" select "Card" and select from the list our board, "LilyPad Arduino"

Did what we pass to the code, we will use the simple test sketch that allows us to blink an LED, in particular the LED is already on the board connected to digital pin 13.

Now when you will press "Load" LEDs transmission residing on our Arduino Uno flash and this will mean that our LilyPad is receiving the code we wrote.

Good fun!