There are a large variety of Programmers for the AVR's. Among those In-system Programmers are most versatile and easy to use. The Manufacturer Website itself provides different kinds of development kits, Programmers, Debuggers, Emulators, JTAG devices and different addons for the application development using AVR microcontrollers.Also the software tools for programming, simulating the results are also provided. The complete tool set called the AVR studio can be downloaded for free by signing in as a user. The only reason for not using these standard devices(Programmers, debuggers etc. provided by the manufacturers ), is their cost and non availability in certain areas.
This lead to development of new 3rd party programmers which are simple and easy to use. They can just be plugged into one of the ports available on the PC, configured properly with the software can work fine. The best option is to use one of these Programmers. One such is provided at lancos.com. PonyProg is a hex file burner software which works in conjunction with SI-Prog, the ISP, different for different family of Microcontrollers.
This lead to development of new 3rd party programmers which are simple and easy to use. They can just be plugged into one of the ports available on the PC, configured properly with the software can work fine. The best option is to use one of these Programmers. One such is provided at lancos.com. PonyProg is a hex file burner software which works in conjunction with SI-Prog, the ISP, different for different family of Microcontrollers.