Change Options for the AVR Programmer via Arduino IDE

Question

I want to program an ATtiny through the Arduino IDE. I have a somehow strange programmer. But I can upload via avrdude by

avrdude -p attiny13 -P /dev/cu.usbmodemfa131 -c stk500v2 -F -B20 -U flash:w:programm.hex

It took a while to figure out that I had to slow the baud rate via the -B20 switch. If I try to upload via the arduino 1.0.5 IDE avrdude is executed as follows.

/Applications/Adafruit Arduino 1.0.5.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avrdude -C/Applications/Adafruit Arduino 1.0.5.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/etc/avrdude.conf -v -v -v -v -pattiny13 -cstk500v1 -P/dev/tty.usbmodemfa131 -Uflash:w:/var/folders/9t/5jldfq752fs1x74_rhn2plz80000gn/T/build7680201613426497544.tmp/attinytest.cpp.hex:i

My question is, how can I change the preferences such that I have control over the avrdude parameters? Say I want to add a -B20 switch and change stk500v1 to stk500v2.

Answer 1

Short answer: I'm afraid you can't do it with Arduino IDE 1.0.5.

Long answer:

First of all, be aware that -B20 does not specify the baud rate but the bitclock period (in us); this is specific to stk500v2 programmer.

Normally, enabling your programmer should only be a matter of adding it to the list of programmers known by Arduino IDE; that list can be found in hardware/arduino/programmers.txt. You would then append the following lines at the end of this file:

strangeprogrammer.name=Somehow Strange Programmer
strangeprogrammer.communication=serial
strangeprogrammer.protocol=stk500v2
strangeprogrammer.force=true
strangeprogrammer.speed=?????

However, the problem here is that Arduino IDE does not seem to be able to use flag -B (bitclock period) but only flag -b (baud rate) which value is set to whatever you will put to strangeprogrammer.speed.

At least that's what I could find out by inspecting Arduino IDE source code: AvrdudeUploader.java never adds that flag to the avrdude command-line :-(

That means your options are:

1. Rebuild the Arduino IDE 1.0 on your own after modifying AvrdudeUploader.java to support -B flag; code should be quite easy (about 2 more lines of Java code).

2. Switch to Arduino IDE 1.5 and follow Federico's answer :-)

3. Use another IDE, something that deserves the IDE name. I use Eclipse with this Arduino plugin and it works fine for me. As a bonus, avrdude support seems better as you can see on the screenshot below: