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As of the time of this writing, I have not done much testing on it. It is properly detected as a USB device, but I still need to program a chip with it to make sure it works.

Other USB cables

There are a few more USB cable designs

• A more complex one uses a USB-to-serial converter chip. I have not used this one either. This one has two advantages over the simple one above (which probably do not make up for the added complexity):
  • The hardware design is similar to the Mini, so with this guy's firmware, it may be possible to use one Mini board to program another
  • It implements the full STK500 spec, so it is possible to do things like timer calibations
• In addition, Atmel makes the AVRATAVRIPSMKII programming cable, available from Digikey. It's fairly inexpensive (~$30), and works well. It uses a 6-pin header (Atmel's standard) instead of the 5 pin header we use (standard on hobbyist boards)[3]. The 6th pin takes VCC, which we need to run from the main header. I've used this to program the Mini. I just ran 5 hookup wires from the plug on the MKII to the header on the Mini, and so that I wouldn't forget the configuration, I put hot glue around the wires. The sixth wire goes to the VCC pin on the Mini:
  

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