I received my USBTinyISP AVR programmer kit from LadyAda.net / AdaFruit.com to program the AVR chip in the LED sign I’ve been working on. Here’s what I got:

There were all sorts of cool little thing-a-ma-whats-its inside:

I put all those parts in a pillow case, along with a spool of solder and my hot soldering iron and swung it around my head about 40 times. Here’s what I ended up with:

Here it is after putting it in it’s case:

I installed the software for it, and Windows detected it. It lights up all purty like when you plug it in, but I can’t get the damn thing to actually communicate with the AVR chip on the LED sign board. I keep getting an “initialization failed” error when I try to run “make install” from a dos prompt to actually write to the AVR chip.

I was up until about 2am last night messing with it. I’ll keep plugging away trying to figure out what the deal is and will report back here when I figure it out OR when I’ve smashed it back into tiny little bits with a sledgehammer.