USBasp and Arduino IDE 1.8.5

[John B]

I am trying to get one of those cheapo USBasp devices to work with the Arduino 1.8.5 IDE and Windows 8.1. However I cannot get the Arduino IDE to recognise the device.

Firstly, I have (successfully) tried installing several drivers, by disabling driver signing enforcement. I have tried the drivers libusb-win32 1.2.4, 1.2.5, 1.2.6 as well as libusbK 3.0.7.0

However, every time I use the Upload Using Programmer function in the Arduino IDE, I get the following message:

avrdude: error: could not find USB device with vid=0x16c0 pid=0x5dc vendor='www.fischl.de' product='USBasp'

With any of the drivers, the VID and PID match the values above, nor do I get any errors from the device manager, ie "This device is working properly." Even when using the drivers from www.fischl.de, it wont work despite it matching all descriptions exactly. Alas the software just won't recognise the device. Any ideas?

[iMo]

For example with Win7:
Also zadig installer helps with installing the drivers https://zadig.akeo.ie/
Use usb 2.0 port with usbasp.

[obiwanjacobi]

Are you sure the driver is installed properly?
I seem to remember you need to disable the check for digital signing of the driver. That setting is buried somewhere deep, not sure about Windows 8, but in Windows 10 you need to do a special restart trick (was it hold shift then click restart?) to get in these config settings...

Almost all cheapo TTL-USB chip drivers are NOT signed.

[2c]

[+Mikie]

If you bought your USBasp from China, and it has a nice coloured aluminium case - it is not a USBasp, but a weird Chinese MX-USB programmer. The circuit is almost the same, but they did their own thing for it to show up as a HID device so it wouldn't need a specific driver.

There is a way to flash a modified USBasp firmware to it and make it into a proper USBasp. I just did it, it isn't hard.

[mtdoc]

Which USB - serial chip is the device using?

[+Mikie]

Which USB - serial chip is the device using?

None. USBasp has ATMega8, 8A or 88 inside. Connects over USB to SPI on the target.

https://www.fischl.de/usbasp/

Chinese "MX" copy/modification:

http://irq5.io/2017/07/25/making-usbasp-chinese-clones-usable/
(3 more links to the subject on that page)

[westfw]

"I have heard" that modern USB controllers are getting increasingly unhappy with the non-conforming parts of the V-USB (bit-banged software USB stack) firmware that the USBASP programmers use.
Folks might be better off with an Arduino Nano set up to permanently run the "Arduino As ISP" sketch (at least if that breaks, you can add as much additional debugging as you might want, and easily make your own changes.)

[mtdoc]

None. USBasp has ATMega8, 8A or 88 inside. Connects over USB to SPI on the target.

Doh!  Of course. I knew that. I even own one.  Haven't used in a while...

Folks might be better off with an Arduino Nano set up to permanently run the "Arduino As ISP" sketch (at least if that breaks, you can add as much additional debugging as you might want, and easily make your own changes.)

Good idea!