Cannot use USBTinyISP to program an ATTiny85 on Mac Lion

USB AVR Programmer and SPI interface. Adafruit's USBtinyISP.

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mnrsiat
 
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Cannot use USBTinyISP to program an ATTiny85 on Mac Lion

Post by mnrsiat »

I have put together a USBTinyISP programmer with the intent of using it with Arduino to program ATTIny85 chips, with no success. I'm attaching pictures of the front & back of the programmer, the Arduino IDE error messages, and the breadboard with the ATTiny85 and the connectors. I'm fairly confident that the hardware is all correct because I plugged it all into a friend's PC exactly as pictured and was able to program it that way.

As far as I can tell the only significant difference between my friend's setup and mine is that I'm on a Mac and she's on a PC. Any advice or thoughts are welcome!

I have tried programming a bootloader, as I started with a new chip, and after my friend was able to program on her setup, I tried uploading sketches (Blink with tiny variations to distinguish the blink pattern so I could tell if it worked). I have Arduino configured to program the ATTiny85 board with three configurations, a 16MHz, 8MHz, and 1MHz (all copied from the Prospective Boards.txt file included in the ATTiny library from https://code.google.com/p/arduino-tiny/). I have it set to use the USBTinyISP programmer in the Tools > Programmer menu. I tried all three configurations.

From various hints on these forums and other places, I thought it might be worth trying to force an older version of USB than 3.0, which my Mac's USB ports are, and found an old Mac keyboard with a built-in hub (might have been old enough to be USB1) but without success.

In every case I've tried, I get the error:

Code: Select all

         Description     : USBtiny simple USB programmer, http://www.ladyada.net/make/usbtinyisp/
avrdude: programmer operation not supported

avrdude: Using SCK period of 10 usec

avrdude: error: usbtiny_transmit: usb_control_msg(DeviceRequestTO): unknown error
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
         Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
         this check.
The error message in the image shows the full results from an attempt to program Blink using the 1M board configuration. I don't know for sure that all the information above what's quoted above is the same for all the attempts I've made.
error message from arduino IDE
error message from arduino IDE
arduino-errors.png (131.29 KiB) Viewed 675 times
breadboard and connectors
breadboard and connectors
IMG_7176 copy.jpg (161.31 KiB) Viewed 675 times
the programmer I built
the programmer I built
front-n-back.png (903.86 KiB) Viewed 675 times

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adafruit_support_rick
 
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Re: Cannot use USBTinyISP to program an ATTiny85 on Mac Lion

Post by adafruit_support_rick »

the rc=-1 error means that avrdude was able to talk to the USBtinyISP, but that it didn't get any response from the ATtiny. If you're certain that your hardware is OK, then the problem may be in the avrdude.conf file on the mac. Try comparing/copying the one from your friend's computer

mnrsiat
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2013 11:04 pm

Re: Cannot use USBTinyISP to program an ATTiny85 on Mac Lion

Post by mnrsiat »

Thanks. I compared her and my avrdude.conf files (and our boards.txt files) and found no differences. After further discussion turns out she had installed CrossPack, so I tried that too, replacing the original avr toolchain with CrossPack's:

Code: Select all

micropede:~ micropede$ cd /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/
micropede:tools micropede$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root       staff   24 Jan  2 11:28 avr -> /usr/local/CrossPack-AVR
drwxr-xr-x  19 micropede  staff  646 Feb 21  2009 avr-original
with no success. Same error message.

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adafruit_support_rick
 
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Re: Cannot use USBTinyISP to program an ATTiny85 on Mac Lion

Post by adafruit_support_rick »

You might want to try a powered hub instead of the keyboard. A different USB cable couldn't hurt, either.
Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you - your USBtiny itself appears to be working

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