Re: [avrdude-dev] Speeding up buspirate

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Michal Ludvig wrote:

> 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?

At least, in order to help speed things up.

> Is there anything else I can do to speed things up? (apart from
> writing shorter code ;-)

Not without improving the programmer itself.  FTDI ran into that some
years ago.  They offer some generic bit-banging support, but together
with USB latencies and overhead, that is also pretty slow.  In recent
chips, they added a kind of sophisticated hardware block that can be
completely programmed over USB (so it doesn't need to be fixed into a
single target programming architecture), yet allows to speed up things
like page programming by running that at hardware speed.  (I didn't
really look into the details, so that's merely hearsay.)  I'm afraid
without something like that, any kind of bit-banging beyond that that
could be done directly at some IO port of your computer will always be
very slow.  (That's the reason why parallel-port attached simple
bit-bangers were so popular about 10 years ago when the AVR started to
gain its popularity.)

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)