<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div><span><br></span></div>Hello all,<br><br>I was at the June meeting, it was nice to meet some kindred spirits.<br><br>Anyways, there was some discussion about getting started with Arduinos and AVR chips, and techniques for uploading code to ATTiny and non-Arduino AVR chips.<br><br>I had recently built a couple ATTiny85 based ISP programmers. I couldn't remember the name at the time, but I looked when I got home, and wrote a brief blog post about it:<br><br><a href="http://bytecruft.blogspot.com/2013/06/little-wire.html">http://bytecruft.blogspot.com/2013/06/little-wire.html</a><br><br>I'd forgotten about the blog entry until I saw yesterday that Dangerous Prototypes had pickup on my post, and mentioned it on their front page.<br><br>The Little Wire is probably one of the cheapest ways to get an AVR programmer (if you don't
count the value of your time spent assembling it). <br><br>I made two of them, one for my wife. My original intent was to use the first one to "bootstrap" the second one using the first, but I ran into a couple issues with the fuses in avrdude, and cheated with a different official Atmel AVR programmer that can un-brick chips with fuse issues.<br><br>If anyone has an interest in making one of these, let me know. You have a slight "chicken and egg" problem in that you need an initial device to program the programmer. I'm probably going to make July's meeting. August is looking iffy.<br><br>There are Arduino sketches out on the web for using an Arduino board as a chip programmer. My wife and I tried that, and struggled to get avrdude to recognize it consistently. We found the Little Wire to be much easier to work with.<br><br>I can also help anyone interested in doing "pure" C/C++ on AVR chips. If you're a seasoned C/C++ developer and a Windows user,
Atmel's AVR Studio is free, and pretty easy to setup, and a lot more convenient than the Arduino IDE. <br><br>--Jon<br><br> <div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </div> </div></body></html>