Recently I wanted to use a really tiny, low pin-count microcontroller for a project, so I decided to buy a few Atmel ATtiny10 to experiment with.

To get it working, I would need a compiler and a programmer. I like working with Atmel chips because they have cross-platform development tools. The Arduino IDE that I’ve been using comes with avr-gcc and avrdude, both of which are really awesome open source tools for compiling and uploading code to the microcontrollers. If you just want the tools without the Arduino IDE, you can get the WinAVR package.

However both of these tools do not work with the ATtiny10 yet. I do not expect a C compiler, but even the GNU assembler that comes with avr-gcc still doesn’t support this chip. avrdude recently added support for uploading to the ATtiny10, but only through the STK or AVRISP programmer, which I didn’t want to fork out money to buy.

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