Please add a big warning label on the description to really look at the schematics before using this shield. I have used this programmer for two days and bricked four ATMega328p, perhaps destroying them partly as they don’t seem to work correctly.
Bootloader programming seems to work reasonable well with the shield, but then you load the sketch with the command “Upload using programmer” and things turns really weird. From the comments I understod that VCC is connected to the A5 line of the AtMega328. This line is used by the standard Wire library. I.e things get ugly when then newly programmed ATMega328 reboots and starts using the line. Other strange things happens if you use the Serial-library as the serial lines are connected to the system serial lines… and just interfere with everything communicating with the bottom shield.
Then people are mentioning a 10uF capacitor.. please document why and how in the non-existing instructions on how to build this shield.
I might have had my expectations wrong, but built my own programmer on a prototyppe board and then decided that I need a zero insertion socket and Voilá, this shield solves all that. Instead I got two days of problems, buying and modifying an AVR Dragon-board to unbrick the damaged chips, not to mention downloading and configure the AVR Studio (bad software, bad drivers) etc… If you are to build a multi-device programmer, please have a look at the AVR dragons approach were you need jumper wires to connect the power to the different pins on the different chips.
The description text claims the shield can do a lot more than just burning the bootloaders, but it is really not done for programming standard sketches without modifications. Please tell people this directly in the shield description! Ps. Really love the other work you do, but this device was too badly documented. Ds.
