A bit OT: external equipment for writing...

[Ian Smith]

At 17:40 30/03/2004, Richard Smith wrote:
>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.

Interesting!

Maybe we've just been lucky as I've only installed it on a Win2K box, and 
have only really used it for blowing BIOS proms. I've not seen the German 
dialog boxes either.

As for performance, it's well ahead of the Stag & Data IO programmers I've 
used in the past, but granted that isn't saying much.

Cheers

Ian