AVR Programmers/Debuggers - Which to buy?

[yami759]

Hello! As a student, I have a pretty tight budget, and was looking to buy a proper AVR programmer (Arduino isn't exactly cutting it for me any more). I have noticed some third-party programmers, such as the Sparkfun Pocket AVR Programmer or Adafruit USBtinyISP AVR Programmer, but, especially with the Sparkfun one, I'm not sure how reliable and supported these will be. If anyone has experience with them and could recommend one, I'd love to be able to get one as a cheap solution. Unfortunately, I don't suppose it will be that easy. The very popular AVRISP mkii seems to be discontinued, and the next options I had seen were the AVR Dragon and Atmel Ice, both of which also act as debuggers. The Dragon, I believe, is not actually fully assembled when purchased, and has no accessories, and rather you are meant to solder your own components to it. The Ice seems to be an enclosed programmer/debugger at double the price (I have absolutely no idea on the usefullness/differences in that respect are, help would be greatly appreciated). The Ice is out of my budget, but there seems to be an Ice Basic Kit at about half the price, with the main Ice unit and the main cable, missing the adapter board and breakout cable. How important would these be (they are probably pretty important for a $40 cut)? Any help with any of these would be extremely appreciated. Thanks in advance 

[Robartes_m]

If low budget is your main driver, you can't get better than a USBasp. There are Chinese versions of it available on eBay for less than 5$, or you could even build one yourself as all the schematics and code are available at Thomas Fischl's site:

http://www.fischl.de/usbasp/

[nitro2k01]

*Exactly* how low is your budget? If you already own an Arduino board, the hardware should be perfectly fine. You do of course not need to use the horrid Arduino software that comes with it, but you can use avrdude to burn a compiled file from any environment. And if you want to program non-Arduino projects, you can still set up the Arduino to act as an external ISP programmer and use patch wires to hook it up. If nothing, you may want to look into this if you decide to order a $5 USBASP and get impatient during the month that the shipping will almost certainly take...

A USBASP is good and cheap start, though. It take a bit of fiddling to get the driver running if you're on 64-bit Windows, but nothing too bad.

[andersm]

Remember to check that the device you're getting is supported in your intended development environment.

[ajb]

Atmel ICE.  It programs and debugs every AVR and SAM (ARM) device currently out there, and will do it much faster than any of the less expensive options.  Don't bother with the more expensive kit, the basic one has a combo 50mil/10-position and 100mil/6-position cable that will get you started, and for an extra $15 or so you can make way better adapters for other connectors than you'd get in the more expensive kit.

The Dragon does't require any assembly before use, the unpopulated areas on it are for optional sockets for out-of-system programming.  It does distinguish itself from other programmers by supporting the high voltage programming modes, but that's only a compelling point for certain niche applications.

[yami759]

Thanks for all the replies!

@nitro2k01 I don't have an exact budget, but I'd be willing to pay probably $50 maximum if I decide to get a professional programmer like the Dragon or Ice, but under $25 (closer to my originally-planned budget before I found out about the aforementioned) would be fantastic, if I can find something easy to work with and without a lot of headache.

@ajb From my understanding, the Dragon also supports all AVR devices, yes? In that case, would the Ice have the benefit of also working with ARM devices, but the drawback of less features (such as high-voltage programming to un-brick chips)?

[tggzzz]

I used the  Dragon successfully, and can recommend it.

I added a ZIF socket and programmed devices and executed the programs while the device was in the ZIF socket. It is also useful for resurrecting Arduino-class devides which have a corrupted bootloader. It has the HV mode, so the fuses can be changed to unbrick a device.

More interestingly and usefully, if your prototype board has the obvious JTAG connections, then you can program the processor and fully-debug it while it is in your board. Fully debug means single stepping, peeking/poking registers and memory and IO. That doesn't rely on any Arduino features, so your program can be in complete control of the silicon.

[ajb]

@ajb From my understanding, the Dragon also supports all AVR devices, yes? In that case, would the Ice have the benefit of also working with ARM devices, but the drawback of less features (such as high-voltage programming to un-brick chips)?

I believe the Dragon can program all of the AVRs, but from memory there are certain limitations.  I believe it was something like not supporting PDI on certain XMEGA devices (so you'd have to use JTAG instead), but not sure off the top of my head.

The only time you'd need to use high voltage programming is if you've configured a device to use the reset pin as an IO, or you've configured the device to run from an external clock but don't have one fitted to the target.  (The clock misconfiguration can also be recovered by injecting an external clock temporarily).  Note that these two conditions are only possible with ATMega and ATTiny parts; the XMega and SAM devices start from an internal oscillator on power on and have dedicated reset/programming pins, so as long as the chip isn't fried you can ALWAYS program it.  So the high voltage programming facility isn't a huge selling point unless you absolutely have to use all 6 GPIOs on an 8 pin part, or you really can't bear to throw away a $3 chip that you screwed the fuses on.

The Dragon will also be slower, and is known to not be terribly well protected, electrically, so it's not all that appealing when you can get an Atmel ICE for about ten bucks more.

[yami759]

Does anyone have experience with the cheaper Sparkfun or Adafruit programmers?

[andersm]

I have an USBtinyISP, it's worked great with avrdude on Linux and OS X.

[helius]

The Atmel ICE is also available as a bare board, for $20 less than the bare board Dragon.

[yami759]

@helius Can you get the cable(s) you need cheaply, though?

[helius]

I didn't check, as I have a crimp tool for making such cables.