Buying a Programmer/Debugger

[jrozner]

Looking to finally upgrade from my janky Arduino based ISP programmer to something a little fancier. I'm currently working primarily with avr but am planning to start digging more into arm for future projects. I know that atmel has their fancy programming/debugger system that does all the avr and sam chips but was wondering if there were any recommendations for something that would support more or offer more functionality? For debugging I'm planning to use gdb with openocd where ever possible so preferably something that supports that.

[bson]

How about the Tin Can Tools Flyswatter2?  I've used the original Flyswatter with a number of projects and would probably get the updated v2 next time I use OpenOCD (which admittedly was a while ago).  http://www.tincantools.com/JTAG/Flyswatter2.html

[fki82]

If you want to debug ATMEGAs and SAMs, there seems to be no other way than to buy the ATMEL box.
For debugging the ATMEGAs, the debugger needs debugWIRE, which is proprietary to ATMEL.
I don't know of any non-ATMEL debugger that supports it.