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usbtiny not working with avrdude


I recently bought a USBtiny ISP programmer from gikfun on eBay. It is labeled Deek Robot v20 on the PCB. It was cheap. Using avrdude I am unable to communicate with my atmega328p micro-controller. The drivers for USBtiny are loaded correctly.

I'm getting the error

avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
...

The 6 pin IDC connector from the USBtinyto atmega328p is wired up like this:

IDC pin atmega328p 1 18 (MISO) 2 7 (Vcc) 3 19 (SCK) 4 17 (MOSI) 5 1 (RESET) 6 8 (GND)


Solution

  • Turns out the problem was the IDC cable that came with the USBtiny is made incorrectly. The connector on one end is on backwards, so after taking that into consideration I was able to get it to work.