[avrdude-dev] Adding support for new programmer...

[Robert Connolly]

Hi,

I am a student at the University of Auckland's (New Zealand) Electrical
and Computer Engineering Department. Within our department we have a
custom piece of hardware (internally known as the 'donkey') which we use
to program various AVR micro-controllers.

The unit consists of a small USB dongle which provides a standard AVR
ISP pin arrangement as the output. USB-Serial interface is via a FTDI
FT232R chip. I have uploaded the schematic diagrams to my website for
your information, see: http://svn.webworxshop.com/files/Donkey%20PCB.pdf 

I am interested in adding support to Avrdude for the donkey,
specifically because the current software is windows only and I am a
Linux user.

The FTDI chip in question is supported and detected by the kernel (mine
presents a serial device on /dev/ttyUSB0), so I thought adding support
would be as simple as adding the correct .avrduderc file for a serbb
programmer. My attempt at this is given below:

> programmer
>   id    = "donkey";
>   desc  = "University of Auckland ECE Donkey";
>   type  = serbb;
>   reset = 4;
>   sck   = 7;
>   mosi  = 8;
>   miso  = 2;
> ;

Unfortunately, you will notice that the miso pin is connected to the 
RXD pin on the FTDI chip, which according to the comments in /etc/avrdude.conf
is not supported.

Can anyone tell me why this is and if there is a way to get this programmer 
working with Avrdude?

Thanks in advance,

Regards,

Rob Connolly