Author Topic: BusPirate as an AVR programmer?  (Read 5592 times)

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Online Doctorandus_P

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Re: BusPirate as an AVR programmer?
« Reply #25 on: January 25, 2019, 02:26:10 am »
Why would you want to spend USD30 on a bus pirate if you can get a complete linux computer with 40 odd I/O pins with I2C / SPI / UART / ETC for less than that? (Gosh, there is a BeagleBone Pocket for USD 25).

I especially like the combination of the BeaglbeBone Black with a Linux host.
Just plug it into a USB port and then browse to it with your favourite web browser. Not even a power cable is needed.
Also no need to install drivers as (most) Linux distro's support HTTP over USB.
http://beagleboard.org/getting-started#step3
For less advanced OS'es you need to install some drivers to get this working.

Another toy to play with those busses is a board like the ESP8266 or ESP32 in combination with micro python.
You can access it over WiFi with a web browser and use a terminal like REPL interface in your favourite web browser to execute lines of code on the ESP.
http://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/esp8266/quickref.html#webrepl-web-browser-interactive-prompt

For ESP8266 I want to recommend the "Wemos D1 Mini". These are pretty small an cheap boards which fit directly in a breadboard.
They also have an onboard CH340 for communication / programming and are compatible with the "arduino" framework.
 

Offline janoc

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Re: BusPirate as an AVR programmer?
« Reply #26 on: January 25, 2019, 09:57:47 pm »
Why would you want to spend USD30 on a bus pirate if you can get a complete linux computer with 40 odd I/O pins with I2C / SPI / UART / ETC for less than that? (Gosh, there is a BeagleBone Pocket for USD 25).

And you spend an hour or two making the bus work on that Beaglebone or RPi, figuring out which packages you need for Python and how to even start if you don't have a clue about embedded Linux and things like device tree (needed to enable those buses).

Compare with Buspirate - plug in, connect serial terminal emulator, select I2C/SPI/whatever mode from the menu and work. Plus it works with both 3.3 and 5V devices (RPi and similar are 3.3V only and not 5V tolerant).

Full list of features that are available out of the box, without having to configure anything is here:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Features_overview

Can a BeagleBone or RPi do this? Of course. But you will spend a good while hacking up together code to implement those protocols (or looking for libraries) instead of debugging your project.
 


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