Amtel Studio 6.2 and Olimex AVRISPMK2 chip programming

[Bj]

Hi Folks... The moderator wanted me to post here to share my installation of Amtel Studio 6.2 and the AvrispMk2, programming a ATTiny85.

It took quite a while for me to get it working.  There were several things that I went through to get it installed.  I have included each "gotcha" that I had to get through to install on my Win7 64bit Amd cpu (should be same for intel cpu)  Also, my guess is that vista 64 and win 8 will all be similar.

1. Drivers:

I did solve this.  FYI the "F8 disable driver signature ..." doesn't work.  Once disable boot is in place then the drivers need to be reinstalled even after being installed with a disabled boot.  Even then when the drivers are loaded I had problems.  The reason for this is that the enforcement of driver signatures is now done at the Kernel level not the system level for windows OS's (Vista 64 forward).  The kernel contacts MS online to verify valid signed certificate and this is pre F8 during boot.

The solution is to install Atmel Studio (6.2 in my case) and after install choose to update from within the Atmel Studio environment.  In the update list will be a signed USB driver that works.

2. Breadboard Connections:

I also found that my breadboard connections were very problematic.  I have had this problem for a long time and it always blindsides me.   Solution, I went to a "Solder" breadboard from sparkfun.  Much better.  Mouser also has them.

3.  Ok this one is a weird one.  Errors in the code that don't show up in the debugger, also known as runtime errors.  Once I revisited my "blink" code I found runtime programming issues that allowed the load in the chip I was trying to program to fail verification (cause it failed to run) but the non-descript error code didn't show that and it wasn't noted on the web that I could find.


4. Atmel Studio 6.2 communications settings:

So I found my problem.  In an obscure forum posting I read a recommendation to set the communication speed to 1.6khtz.  The slowest setting in Atmel Studio 6.2 is 1.2khtz.  All the other references were saying to leave the speed at the default 1.2khtz.  Once the communication speed was changed everything worked great and success was achieved.

I am excited to begin on my many project designs.  This was the last step I needed to achieve before building production prototypes. bh, Pres. Chipdriven.com (no flashlights ;-), but the real stuff is confidential)

Last word:  The led is still blinking, last word, last word, last word ....