Cheap STK500 AVR Programmer

Atmel Studio is a powerful tool for making AVR programs, but writing a program is the first step. To use your program, you must make a circuit and transfer your code into the microcontroller. You can program your AVR from Atmel Studio by the use of STK500 hardware. Why you cannot program MCU directly from computer by cheap hardware like PIC microcontrollers? The answer is that to transfer your program to IC you must use SPI connection, but there is no SPI port on the PC. There is plenty of software that uses RS232 port as SPI, but you cannot program your AVR directly from Atmel Studio like them. Here I introduce you software that simulates STK500 hardware on the PC and sends data to the microcontroller using RS232 via simple and cheap hardware. Note that using PC RS232 as SPI port is slow and programming the chip will take more time than an STK500 device.

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