[avrdude-dev] xmega status

[Paul Thomas]

Hello,

I'm new to the list, but I wanted to ask a few questions while my
hardware design is still on paper.

First, it looks like from both the mailing list and the source tree
that programming xmega parts using the jtagmkII via the JTAG interface
is supported. Is that right? Are there any problems/limitations? I saw
one post that said the fuse programming didn't work?

Second, are any other programmers supported? It would be nice to use
something like the USBtinyISP or the AVRISP2 (low cost). I saw this
post (http://blog.frankvh.com/2009/09/22/avr-xmega-and-avrisp-mk2/)
that says the AVRISP2 is supported by the latest avr studio. From the
description it looks like the old ISP was 3-wire SPI whereas the xmega
is only 2-wire (shared data). In the source tree I saw just a few
references to the XMEGA PDI interface, but nothing to suggest it was
supported. Also on the mailing list a couple of people asked about
using the PDI interface, and it looked like it was undocumented from
Atmel and thus unsupported by avrdude? Do I have this right?

Finally, what support is there for using a bootloader with avrdude on
the xmega parts? Looking at this site
(http://pramode.net/2008/01/23/avr-atmega16-bootloader-experiments/)
it looks like the butterfly programming type is just talking to a
bootloader. Has anyone tried something similar with the XMEGAs? Is the
butterfly "type" what I should be investigating?

thanks,
Paul