AVRDUDE

AVRDUDE - AVR Downloader Uploader - is a program for downloading and uploading the on-chip memories of Microchip’s AVR microcontrollers. It can program the Flash and EEPROM, and where supported by the programming protocol, it can program fuse and lock bits. AVRDUDE also supplies a direct instruction mode allowing one to issue any programming instruction to the AVR chip regardless of whether AVRDUDE implements that specific feature of a particular chip.

AVRDUDE was originally written in 2003 by Brian S. Dean. Since 2006, AVRDUDE has been maintained by Jörg Wunsch, with the help of various contributors.

The latest version of AVRDUDE is always available here:
https://github.com/avrdudes/avrdude

Documentation

Documentation for current and previous releases is on Github Pages. Git main is documented only with the most recent avrdude.pdf.

Getting AVRDUDE for Windows

To get AVRDUDE for Windows, install the latest version from the Releases page.

Alternatively, you may build AVRDUDE yourself from source.

Getting AVRDUDE for Linux

To install AVRDUDE for Linux, install the package avrdude using the software package manager. For example, under Debian/Ubuntu, you can use the following commands:

sudo apt-get install avrdude

Alternatively, you may build AVRDUDE yourself from source.

Getting AVRDUDE for macOS

On macOS, AVRDUDE can be installed through MacPorts or Homebrew.

Alternatively, you may build AVRDUDE yourself from source.

Using AVRDUDE

AVRDUDE is a command-line application. Run the command avrdude without any arguments for a list of options.

A typical command to program your HEX file into your AVR microcontroller looks like this:

avrdude -c <programmer> -p <part> -U flash:w:<file>:i

For instance, to program an Arduino Uno connected to the serial port COM1 with a HEX file called blink.hex, you would run the following command:

avrdude -c arduino -P COM1 -b 115200 -p atmega328p -D -U flash:w:objs/blink.hex:i

There are many different programmers and options that may be required for the programming to succeed.

For more information, refer to the AVRDUDE documentation.

Using the AVRDUDE GUI demonstrator

Starting with version 8, a GUI implementation has been added, to demonstrate the functionality of libavrdude is suitable to implement a native GUI (as opposed to CLI wrapper).

The GUI is based on the Qt toolkit and its Python bindings, called PySide. Either Qt5 with PySide2, or Qt6 with PySide6 are supported.

A script named avrdude-gui is installed into the same location as the AVRDUDE CLI program. It can be used to start the GUI. There is a builtin help describing the usage.