Re: [avr-gcc-list] UISP vs AVRDUDE

[Marek Michalkiewicz]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 10:36:04AM -0700, E. Weddington wrote:

> Perhaps I'm a little biased, but I would think that avrdude is a little 
> bit better. There are some advantages to avrdude:
> - avrdude can be easily extended (add devices / cables) through a 
> text-based configuration file. No compiling is necessary when adding a 
> device or cable.
> - avrdude is known to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. The 
> original author of avrdude, Brian Dean, is currently using it on a Mac.
> - avrdude has a *native* Win32 version. uisp does not; it has to be 
> built and linked to the Cygwin DLL.
> 
> avrdude does have the ability to read/write Intel Hex and Motorola 
> S-Records.
> 
> Also note that uisp was being mostly maintained by Ted Roth, who is no 
> longer working on any AVR projects. There is a new maintainer for uisp, 
> Margarita Manterola. But I would think that avrdude is probably the more 
> active of the two projects.

I was the active uisp maintainer before Ted Roth.  As uisp was written
in C++ (and not very cleanly), one of the TODO items was "clean rewrite
in C" - and avrdude happens to be just that.  Even if I spent some time
on uisp a few years ago, I too recommend avrdude - you are not biased :)

One of uisp features not yet present in avrdude is support for DASA
(direct serial access - using RS232 control lines) cables.  Probably
not very difficult to add to avrdude, if there is enough interest.

Yet another one of these programmers (with support for various serial
EEPROM chips - that's why I mention it) is PonyProg.  Unfortunately,
it is GUI only (no command line), and recent versions are closed
source (it was GPL initially, the old source is still available).

Marek