Burning Multple chips using one programmer?

[erich81]

Forgive my ignorance in advance if this is a dumb question, but is there anything stopping someone from burning multiple chips at once with one USBtinyISP? I was thinking of building a jig that say, 5 chips could be inserted into, with the proper traces broken out in parallel to a single 6 pin ICSP header that I connect the programmer to. Then, when You use AVRDude to burn them, it burns all 5 at once. Would this work? Thinking of ways to save some time burning multiple chips, if possible.

Thanks!

[adafruit_support_mike]

Don't apologize.. I had to do some digging to find the answer.

According to Atmel, the answer is "no". ICSP doesn't support programming multiple chips in parallel, probably because of conflicts on the MISO line.

[erich81]

Shucks. Thanks for doing the research, I had done some quick googling, as I need to burn a couple of chips for a project, was thinking of a quicker way to do it than one at a time.

I suppose houses that pre-program chips have some special machine to load code on.

[adafruit_support_mike]

In a production setting, that's one of those nice problems you can solve by throwing hardware at it. Programmers are cheap if you have lots of microcontrollers on hand, so the main question is, "where does the point of diminishing returns set in?" Going from one programmer to two is a no-brainer. Going from 200 to 201 isn't nearly as exciting.