I just completed my setup and flashed my first driver yesterday. I’m using the same cheap programmer. The list and links of what I have:
Hardware:
Programmer from FastTech: http://www.fasttech.com/product/1002900
Clip: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/SOIC8-SOP8-Flash-Chip-IC-Test-Clip-EEPROM-In-circuit-Programm-BIOS-93-25-24-26-2-/281148522982?pt=AU_B_I_Electrical_Test_Equipment&hash=item4175c201e6
Cable: https://www.fasttech.com/p/1011800
I pulled of the clip’s original cable and used 6 strands of the FastTech cable I bought to connect to the correct pins, just like Tom E did here: Want to learn how to reprogram my own drivers. Got the interface parts today
I had several different sources for the pin configuration, all gathered from a couple of BLF posts, and I got dizzy from switching between them so I edited them all into one image:
Software (in order of installation)
Driver for programmer, USBasp-win-driver-x86-x64-ia64-v1.2.5, from WarHawk’s dropbox link above (thanks WarHawk).
Libusb from here: Download libusb-win32-bin-1.2.6.0.zip (libusb-win32) (I read somewhere on this forum that it was needed so I installed it before any testing).
AVRDUDE 6.1 for uploading compiled hex files to the chip. I downloaded the avrdude-6.1-mingw32.zip file from here: Index of /releases/avrdude/
AVR Studio 5.1 to program and compile your own HEX files from source code: as5installer-stable-5.1.208-full.exe - Google Drive
There are later versions of AVR Studio, but I did not want to deviate the slightest from Comfychair’s excellent guide: howto: Use Atmel AVR Studio 5 to make a .hex file
Notes
In order to test the programmer you can use this AVRDUDE command:
avrdude -p t13 -c usbasp -n
Note that this command can test two things. First it can check weather AVRDUDE can find the programmer at all. If AVRDUDE can’t find the programmer you will see and error message like:
avrdude: error: could not find usb device
If it can find the programmer it will check if it can find the chip. If it can’t find the chip (possibly bad attached clip) the error message will look something like this:
avrdude: warning: cannot set sck period…
avrdude: error: program enable: target doesn’t answer. 1
If AVRDUDE can find the chip you will see something like this:
avrdude: warning: cannot set sck period…
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions
Reading | ###############################
So when you use this command to test and get an error message, check what kind of error message it is. I got the second error message (programer ok but no chip) and thought that AVRDUDE couldn’t even find the programmer. It took some head scratching and testing before I figured this one out.
The cannot set sck period warning shows up all the time, even when programming is fine. Don’t know what it means and couldn’t be bothered to flash new firmware into the programmer as it works for me and I don’t want to mess things up.
I read WarHawk’s excellent guide on using AVRDUDE to flash the chips: howto: flash ATtiny with AVRDude and command prompt
AVRDUDE is a command prompt software. Open a command prompt to use and make sure you open it with administrator rights. If you don’t know how to use a command prompt you can edit bat files and run them with admin rights, just make sure you have pause as the last command or you won’t see if the flash was successful or not. If you don’t know how to edit bat files either you might find all this a little too much.
I have not tried this on a computer infected with the Windows 8 or 8.1 virus. I have Windows 7 professional 64 bit.