A friend gave me a Trinket

It appears to be a genuine Adafruit Trinket, v1.1. It has headers for the 8 pins, plus two more for USB and BAT. And it has a Mini-USB socket, and a reset button.

I've done some reading, and it appears there are two ATTiny85 boards which are flashable via USB - the Trinket, and the Digispark. They have different bootloaders, and the Digispark converts the reset pin to a GPIO. And then I guess the third option would be to do away with the bootloader, and flash the 85 with a programmer.

I don't have any experience with these options, and don't have a current need, but wondered if there's any general advice from Tiny fans as to which of these is the most useful. I'm still on the old IDE, if that matters.

Adafruit has excellent getting started guides for most of their products. They are intended for beginners, but I almost always learn something useful from them.

If you have an ISP programmer, use that. I have a handful of original Trinkets and they're a pain in the butt to program via USB. Generally take me like 10 tries of fiddling with the pushbuttons and starting the download before it works.

Not Adafruit's best hour!

Would you recommend any hobby-level ISP programmer?

Couldn't I just program it with a Nano - "Arduino as ISP"?

And with no bootloader, what about fuses? Will that all be in the boards.txt for the 85?

You should be able to program it with any ISP programmer: I haven't done that with this particular device, but I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work. I just know that the software USB with the bootloader is frustrating to use. Maybe it's been updated since mine were purchased? No idea.

I wonder if DigiSpark is any better.

I strongly recommend Pololu's AVR ISP V2.1 programmer. Best I've every used, very versatile and doubles as a USB serial adapter or "FTDI" serial port programmer.

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