Hooking up USBasp programmer to the ATTiny85

After putting off the ESPClock project for quite a looooong while, I finally decided to pick up the project again.

But the Arduino Uno board had been siphoned off by my eldest son for one of his science projects, so I decided to pick up a cheap USPasp clone off eBay to help with programming the ATTiny85.

First off is to connect the 2x5 ISP header to the ATTiny85. It was a bit confusing at first, but after some research, here are the connections required.

I plugged the wires into the 10-pin ISP header, and soldered the other ends to two 1x4 male headers in the correct order. That way, I can just plug the male headers into the breadboard alongside the ATTiny85 quite easily to start programming it without too much fiddling.

I had to strengthen the soldering with some hot glue to prevent the wires from breaking off the headers when plugging them in and out repeatedly. Works a treat so far.

Then choose "USBasp" as the programmer under the Arduino IDE:

I was getting this error when trying to upload a test "Blink" sketch:

avrdude: error: could not find USB device with vid=0x16c0 pid=0x5dc vendor='www.fischl.de' product='USBasp'

This was resolved by the solution given here:

Downloading Zadiag from http://zadig.akeo.ie/
Start zadig
Options > List all devices
Select USBasp from the drop down menu
Select libusbK(v3.0.7.0) driver
Click Install

I was then able to upload the "Blink" sketch and confirms that the USBasp programmer works as advertised.

ESPCLOCK1 / ESPCLOCK2 / ESPCLOCK3 / ESPCLOCK4

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