I am getting an AVR Dragon soon, and am wondering if there was a way to make it program EPROM or Flash chips?
AFAICT, no. Microcontrollers are usually programmed few a small number of lines (5 to 8), and parallel ROMs are programmed using (almost) all the lines. It looks like the "prototyping" area on the Dragon isn't configured for the later, and is instead set up so that you can connect the smaller number of programming lines arbitrarily.
Okay, thanks for the help.
How hard would it be to rig something up with some shift registers and binary counters?
Building a Flash programmer is an easy if tedious task, especially if you have a microcontroller with more pins than what you're programming. About half of all flash doesn't even need a higher-than-5V voltage to enter programming mode, so you don't even need that. The obnoxious part comes from when the different 'PROMs that need Vhh on different pins. Or voltages other than 5V and 12V for the two programming voltages.
The binary counters or shift registers would work, but you'll still need something to sequence the whole thing. So that sounds like a cost-reduced parallel port programmer.
tepples wrote:
How hard would it be to rig something up with some shift registers and binary counters?
Probably not worth the hassle IMO. If you're going to do all that re-engineering to make the extra hardware work with the device you'd be better off to start from scratch...
lidnariq wrote:
but you'll still need something to sequence the whole thing.
I was thinking of doing the sequencing with the MCU, as a DIY alternative to Willem or Wellon for people who already have an MCU dev board. Some fans of Arduino products have
the same idea.