A bit OT: external equipment for writing...

Richard Smith rsmith at bitworks.com
Tue Mar 30 11:16:01 CEST 2004


Ian Smith wrote:

> At 13:25 30/03/2004, Antony Stone wrote:
> 
>> the job (but don't expect such a machine to be cheap).
> 
> We use a Batronix USB programmer:
> 
>  >http://progshop.com/shop/programmer/usb-chip-programmer/index.shtml
> 
> List price is 289 USD (plus you'll need a PLCC adapter) which is quite a 
> bit cheaper than a lot of the others on the market, and it will program 
> a huge variety of different chips. It's pretty fast too (much faster 
> than any serial/parallel port programmer)

Wow. our experience with this device has been totally opposite. In my 
opinion it has about the worst programmer user interface I've ever used. 
  It won't install and run on 2 of our machines (an XP box and a win 98 
box) It dosen't do offsets.  Many of the dialog boxes pop up in German. 
  It does a bad job of figuring out when it can skip 0xff's in blank 
areas.  It wants to always read a part first before programming it.  And 
our Advin Pilot U40 which is a parallel port programmer is faster.

I could go on but I'll stop before I get worked up.

The hardware itself seems sound but the software blows hard.  So hard 
that I've seriously considered snooping the data stream and writeing a 
short sweet python cli utility for it.





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