The other day I was trying to program a ATTINY85 with a mySmartUBS light programmer that I have laying around. This one:
This programmer is not a standard programmer in the Arduino IDE, so I set out to find the settings to add to the programmers.txt. This turned out not so easy... everybody seems to have their own settings that work. I've tried them all and one of them worked for me. When the Arduino IDE started programming it would fail with a message that I could not connect to the programmer.
Eventually I started ruling out components in my setup trying to get it to work. Starting with my USB hub that I was using to connect the programmer. Which it this one:
And low and behold.. it instantly worked!!. So somehow this USB hub is messing up my programmer from the Arduino IDE.
Btw: I ended up using this settings:
mysmartusb.name=mySmartUSB
mysmartusb.communication=serial
mysmartusb.protocol=stk500
mysmartusb.program.protocol=stk500
mysmartusb.program.tool=avrdude
mysmartusb.program.extra_params=-P{serial.port}
But I guess all the settings for the programmers.txt I found should work, I did not retry them.