All,
My name is Pierce Nichols, and I run a small company (Logos Electromechanical,
www.logos-electro.com) building a variety of OSHW products. One of these is the Zigduino, an Arduino variant with a built-in 802.15.4 radio.
I use Sparkfun's version of the usbtiny with avrdude 5.11 to flash the bootloader onto the Zigduino. For reasons that are unclear to me, avrdude insists on writing all of the flash in order to put the bootloader at the top of the flash, which take about a minute and a half per board. This is painful when flashing several hundred.
I use the default config file, and I've confirm the problem is present under both Windows 7 and Linux (Ubuntu 12.10, to be specific). Am I missing something, or is this a bug in AVRDude?