I’ve been looking around for a little bit and can’t find a conclusive end…
Does anyone know of any cheaper AVR ISP’s than the 30 buck one from Atmel that still works with AVR Studio? From older posts I see sparkfun made a parallel one that worked, but with Studio4 they dropped support (and I assume the current serial dongle doensn’t work).
…does Spark Fun plan on making one ? Atmel does freely give the schematic on their website. I’d just really like one that worked with AVR Studio. $30 bucks is cheap, but $15 is even better… and if I can save the money, then why not?
I’ve got both the AVR ISP, as well as the cheap serial programmer spark sells. The cheap one requires that you use PonyProg to do the programming. The AVR ISP is supported by the Atmel tools and by Avrdude …
Another thing to consider is that (by my observations) the AVR ISP programmer is substantially faster than the pony prog version. This is probably due to the way the PonyProg programmer works.
Unfoortunantly Atmel stoped production of the AVR ISP. They replaced it with the AVR ISP mkII which is USB and is ALOT faster than the serial version. Digikey.com is where you buy.