It was pointless to even glance around before unleashing a rivulet of colorful language.  Nobody was near enough to hear my complaint.  Fortunately.  Another chip had been bricked by my careless use of PonyProg, and unlike the two recent DIP Atmega168s...this one was an Atmega128, mounted in my favorite development board from Olimex.  The madness had to end.  For the third time I had reset a chip to use its low speed internal oscillator, making it too slow for ICSP access.  These micro controllers are so small, they don't even make good paperweights.

It was time to buy a better programmer.  Something USB based that I could use directly from AVR studio.  After finding the AVR Dragon, I thought my problems were solved.  The Dragon does ICSP, JTAG, DebugWire, and Parallel\High Voltage programming.  All for $50.  What else could I possibly need?

Well...ICSP wires would have been nice.  As it turns out, the Dragon is the barest of the bare.  After several attempts to get the finicky Dragon to program...

Read More »