Back in time, when I was an undegrad student, I used to have an Atmel programmer with a parallel connector. Happiness was endless burning micro controllers one time and another, until I upgraded my old but loyal desktop PC for a fancy laptop. I won't lie, I get used to the laptop rapidly with not even a minor remorse about leaving my PC aside. However, the laptop did not have a parallel port. But it was plenty of USB ports, so my first option was to get a parallel-to-USB adapter but just before that happened I lent my programmer to a friend and that fellow has not show up till now. Months later, I looked for a way to make my own programmer to satisfy my thirst of doing electronics and got to the website of Thomas Fischl and his USBasp (http://www.fischl.de/usbasp/) which was simple and cheap. Within a few days I got the components, spent some time doing the routing in Eagle and voilá! a USB programmer was ready to be used... well it was not that easy, the USBasp uses a ATMega8 to deal with the communication protocol between the computer and the device to be programmed. So basically I was in need to use another programmer to burn the code into the ATMega8. Happily for me, there were some spare programmers at my uni that I can borrow. Once that was complete the rest was only the installation of the firmware and a software(eXtreme burner) to write/read into the microcontroller which I also got from Fischl's website.
There are a couple of jumpers in the circuit proposed by Fischl. they allow clock selection (JP1) and self programming (JP2). In my case, JP1 is connected to ground and JP2 had left open since I was not using those features.
Here is my programmer, it is more than 3 years old and it has been used in Peru and now is helping me to do some tasks during my masters studies in Australia. I hope you guys can also enjoy your free time doing some cool stuff using this programmer. If you feel a bit lazy or wanna go safe, the USB programmer can be purchased from Thomas' website.
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