Does anyone know if the above programmer is compatible with windows 8?? I bought some ATMega chips and they weren't the right ones so I was going to buy a programmer to mess around with an program it using AVR studio 6 instead of finding an arduino to use them in.
I have used one of these and it works. Tested few time ago to see how W8 was working, because as a matter of fact I have almost all the C++ development environment working on a Windows7 machine so I have only put a try. But if you have one Arduino at-home (Arduino duemilanove and UNO R2/3 works fine) you can do a very minimal circuit to program from the IDE your AVR with the Arduino. It is one of the options of the IDE.
To speedup the development from the AVR Studio I have bought and I am using a standard AVR MKII programmer from Atmel but it is almost expensive (+/- 30$) and it is the worth only with the AVR Studio because it is the most compatible ISP programmer for fast developing. You can see it here: Connecting Atmel AVRISP mkII - - AVRISP MkII
Instead to program multiple units and save time and money, you can do one for yourself for about the half of the cost of the Pololu with a simple - minimal - circuit I show in the image below. It has the advantage that with a zero-force connector it is fast and secure to put the microcontroller chip inside, program and remove. I had in past to write the same program for every test cycle on about 10 different units. If you need the circuit - very simple - for this silly programmer let me know.
This device (And the same as the one I have) will work with most of the Atmel AVR micro-controllers, this is detailed here https://www.pololu.com/product/1300
I have used it with many ATMEGA328 variety chips and ATMEGA2560, U16/U32s, ATTINY84/85 etc with no issues. Basically any ATMEL chip that supports the ISP programming interface (Which is pretty much all of the AVR range, I'm not aware of any that don't have this)
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