[avrdude-dev] Speeding up buspirate

[Michal Ludvig]

Hi all,

I wonder if there is any way to speed up AVR programming with
non-specialised programmers like the bitbanging serial ones or the
buspirate that I added some time ago? All of these are essentially
direct PC->SPI converters that don't know anything about AVR
programming. Therefore, to my understanding, to program one byte of
flash memory avrdude needs to send a 4 bytes long command to upload a
single byte of code. That's a pretty huge overhead, plus in the case of
buspirate there is one more byte for the buspirate comm protocol. That
makes the programming very slow (roughly 100 bytes / sec).

I wanted to implement paged programming for buspirate but as far as I
can tell that requires support on the programmer side, doesn't it? Is
there anything else I can do to speed things up? (apart from writing
shorter code ;-)

Thanks

Michal