[avrdude-dev] avrdude and WinXP

[E. Weddington]

[This email is in response to a private email from Bruce Lightner. It
affects avrdude and Windows XP. I'm also sending this to Larry Barello
and also to the avrdude developers list as interested parties.]

(First off though, I want to apologize for responding so late about this
issue. I live in Evergreen, CO which is in the mountains west of Denver
at about 8000 feet in altitude. Last Monday night through Thursday
morning we got the snow storm of the century where we personally
received 5-6 feet of snow and we've heard reports of other places in
Evergreen getting up to 11 feet of snow. Our power went off 3 times for
8 hours, 2 hours and 26 hours respectively. My family and I are fine.
Today we've finally able to dig out and the county snow plows have
finally made it here within the last 3 days and have made a single lane
on our road. And yesterday we've lost some deck railing due to falling
snow coming off our roof. Whew!)

Bruce,
Unfortunately, no, I have not seen the issue that you describe with your
programmer and Windows XP (rewriting the parallel port registers). Note
that avrdude was originally written by Brian Dean as avrprog and was
hosted on FreeBSD. It was only recently (within the last 2 months IIRC)
that Brian Dean graciously allowed the program to be open source and
ported to Linux and Windows. So really, avrdude hasn't seen much action
within the Windows world yet.

In getting avrdude to work on Windows, like you, I had to find a method
to get it to control the parallel port. I checked around on other open
source projects and they mostly used the giveio driver with success. All
reports that I heard was that it was fine with NT and 2K. I actually
haven't heard that much reports with XP, either good or bad. I'm not
totally surprised that XP is a different beast.

It does look like from other reports I have seen recently on the avrdude
list that XP also interferes with avrdude in the manner you describe. My
hands are a little bit tied in the fact that I don't have a parallel
port programmer I can use for testing. At work I use an STK500 and I
have Win2K. At home I have XP. :-/

>From looking at the various settings in XP I do have something you can
try:
Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Hardware Tab > Device
Manager button > Ports > LPT1 > Properties > Port Settings > Enable
Legacy Plug n Play Detection: make sure is unchecked. See if that helps.

Please respond to the avrdude developers list. It's easier for me to
check that whether I'm home or at work, thanks.

Let me know how it goes.

Eric Weddington