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I am designing a mobile device around an Attiny84 microcontroller and when I have looked up ways of programming it and making it run, I found that I would need a JTAG progammer. Could the Attiny84 be programmed by USB with something else like a 6 pin header? What other ways can the Attiny84 be programmed?

P.S. No arduino and I am using snow leopard on my mac

user1922878
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The ATTiny84 can be programmed over SPI. See section 19.5 (page 163) of the datasheet for details.

To do this, you will need an AVR programmer (not a JTAG programmer; that's something quite different). One inexpensive option is the USBtinyISP.

  • Can I write my program onto an SD card and have the Attiny84 run off of that (Im trying to make a small device that I use away from the computer) – user1922878 Feb 10 '13 at 23:04
  • No. AVR processors can only execute code from internal program memory. –  Feb 10 '13 at 23:21
  • Well, actually, I think you could have a bootloader load the data off SD card and then run that. Looks like ATTiny84 can have a bootloader, so it is possible *in theory*, though probably not recommended in practice. – angelatlarge Mar 09 '13 at 19:24
  • Honestly, probably not. The program flash on the '84 is pretty damn small (8 KB); by the time you got done writing an SD bootloader, I'm not sure you'd have enough space left for the program it loaded. :) –  Mar 09 '13 at 20:06