I went this route as I had an Atmel microcontroller that I needed to program fast. If you want to get up and running even faster, then Sparkfun sell a Pocket AVR Programmer, based on Adafruit’s USBTinyISP and Dick Streefland’s USBTiny. Learn more about the project, how to build your own, or buy a kit over at Adafruit. The USBTinyISP is a collaborative effort, in the spirit of open source hardware development. I use my USBTiny all the time to program my Toadstool Boards.
This ticked a few boxes for me: it was open-source, it was easy to build yourself (if you prefer that), and it was cheap to buy (if you didn’t want to build one).
After a fair bit of research I came across a great project – the USBTinyISP. When I first started with Atmel Studio, I was a little taken aback at the cost of the programmers needed to flash my programs onto the microcontroller.
