AVRDUDE
More info
- Creator
- Brian S. Dean
- Type
- Command-line tool
- License
- GPL-2.0
- Source
- github.com/avrdudes/avrdude
The command-line tool that writes programs to AVR chips — and quietly did the work every time someone hit Upload in the Arduino IDE.
The name stands for AVR Downloader/UploaDEr, an acronym plainly reverse-engineered from the word. It reads and writes flash, EEPROM and fuse bits through some thirty different programmers: cheap USBasp sticks, Atmel's own STK500 and AVRISP, and the bootloader protocol Arduino boards speak over their serial port.
A typical invocation is avrdude -c usbasp -p m328p -U flash:w:firmware.hex. The dangerous one writes the wrong fuse value: a bad clock selection or a disabled reset pin can leave the chip unreachable by ordinary ISP. Development moved to GitHub in 2022 after years of slow maintenance.