High-Voltage FLASH Programming on ATTINY85

ATTINY85 High-Voltage Programmer

The Bubblegum Chip, Now With Steroids!

The Atmel ATTINY85 is a great chip (cheap, easy to use, supported in the Arduino IDE).  Unfortunately it only has 5 IO pins, which limits its usability.  There are guides on using a High-Voltage Programmer (HVP) to change the Reset pin into an IO pin.  However, that prevents you from programming the Flash (Program Memory) until you re-enable the Reset pin.

Thankfully the Flash can be programmed with an HVP, but the commands and protocol are different.  My USBtinyISP simply cannot be modified to be an HVP.  Using an Arduino as ISP (In-Service Programmer) on an ATTINY85 is fairly simple but doesn’t work if the Reset pin is disabled.

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