arduino programmer

Last update: Thu Jun 5 22:25:40 2025

Purpose

I have a nice AVR ISP mkII and I'm living a happy relation ship with it, a nice menage a trois with Atmel Studio 6. But recently (2014/01/13) I bought a lucky bag at one of my favorites shop Akizukidenshi in Akihabara. Inside there was a handful of old discontinued ATmel chips like AT90S4414 or Attiny26L that can not be programmed with Atmel Studio 6.

Ok so solution is to use avrdude and the avg-gcc solution. So far so good. But to use the AVR ISP mkII I need to install alternate drivers, which I did try.
And there started problems: both drivers can't work at the same time (of course) means that I can use my programmer with Atmel Studio 6 or with avrdude, not both (unless some driver switching magic). So let's dig in that pile of various Arduinos I have and make something useful.

(5~6 years later) Jan 2020: ok I finally did it v(^_^)v It works, yet not perfect. In the meanwhile my environment changed from Windows to Linux and from AVR Studio to Eclipse, but yes, there we are!

Documentations

The official firmware and the one I used Arduino as ISP
Some guys having the same issue http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=printview&t=132953&start=20
A nice explanation of how to do this http://letsmakerobots.com/node/35649

Bill of Materials

Arduino 1.0 (I think), it even has the Italian flag sticker!

An old board I got from Sparkfun discarded boards like 10y ago, apparently was made to be used with a GPS thingy?

Wire, leds, resistors

Commands

READ ME: it works, but sometimes refuses commands, need to try a few time. One thing that came out of my testing is that forcing the baudrate (-b 19200) seems important, so do that future me.

Read low fuse: avrdude -c avrisp -p m328p -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -U lfuse:r:-:i -v

Program: avrdude -v -patmega328p -c avrisp -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b19200 -Uflash:w:/path/to/program.hex:i

Code

In the arduino samples, the "ArduinoISP".
Following changes:

defined the USE_OLD_STYLE_WIRING because I started wiring like that before reading that we could use the SPI module itself and not bitbang it...

as stated in the tutorial I edited the heartbeat() to set a 40ms delay (not sure why, must mess up the timing of something else elsewere)

Pictures

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