In http://www.8052.com/forumchat/read/189805



It's almost a chicken or egg problem, except that we all know which came first. For years, people thought it clever, efficient, and certainly proper, to use resources already available before introducing new ones. Hence, people used the unused handshakes on the serial port to do GPIO things. The sad fact that it's not so convenient to do that with the USB-based serial ports is probably the reason there have been problems with serial programmers, in some cases, working, and in others, failing, in combination with the various MCU-specific serial MCU programmers. Needless to say, the problem is just as bad with parallel port adapters.

I personally find it offensive that, while my old 1996-vintage notebook has a classic serial port and a parallel port, the latter capable of "classic" mode, PS@-bidirectional mode, EPP mode, and ECP mode, a new and otherwise considered much more powerful notebook available today would require external hardware to provide the same capabilities, if it were at all possible to do that. It's almost as though somewhere, in a conference room full of executives, there were a discussion like, "Well, what can we do to the design of modern PC's to make them less capable of doing anything useful?"

The problem, IMHO, isn't with the "ill-conceived" hardware and software design of years past, but, rather, with the inane notion that leaving features off the newer products can masquerade as progress. That's why I don't donate my old computers any longer. I hang onto them, so that the useful function that they once provided won't be lost forever.

As for the O/P's query, it's an old one, and has never been directly addressed, probably for a number of reasons, but the problem he's experiencing is 3-pronged. (1) ATMEL has published a number of serial programmer circuits that have been commercially produced by third parties, not many of which are applicable to more than a few MCU's, (2) not all ATMEL's published programming software works with all these programming circuits, and (3) few, if any, of these ATMEL programming circuits and programming softwares, are even reasonably interchangeable. None of this seems terrible until you're in the position in which the O/P finds himself. He doesn't know which programming software he should be using with the combination of programmer and MCU that he's got.

Perhaps some avid ATMEL user will clear this up by publishing a list of programming circuits, programming software, and MCU's that are actually likely to work together, and, in addition, which USB-based serial ports will enable them to function properly together.

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