I'm drawing a blank with programming the ATTiny85. Nothing seems to be working. I'm prepared to believe that large quantities of stuff from China is either a scam, broken or just won't work. So far the "kickstarter" ATTiny85 board seems to fall into that category. Also the "HW-260" programming board. The latter came from eBay together with the ATTiny85 chips. I have no proof that the ATTiny85 chips are genuine either. They could be 555s with the logos changed. Who knows with these online suppliers?
I've just received this from Aliexpress. It's alleged to program the ATTiny85 but comes with zero instructions which is mighty helpful.
I also found this in my collection of bits. It looks like somekind of programmer but what for, I'm not sure. It was probably one of those things that looked useful that just pushed the total over into the free postage level. I have no idea if this could be used on a Tiny85. Again,no damn instructions.
Yup, most of it. I've bought hundreds and hundreds of types of components from China so far, and only ONE didn't work. Some parts are indeed cheap knock-offs of the real thing with lower performance than the genuine parts (e.g. counterfeit DS18B20, some opamps), but still work for the most part except in applications that are particularly demanding. For the most part, it's a matter of "plug, play & don't worry about a thing".
You can program your ATTiny85's with an ISP/ASP programmer or use an Arduino board as ISP. Nobody can guarantee you that yours are not "555's with a different logo", but so far the odds are 99.9% your Tiny's are OK and you just need to step up your game.
When stuff comes that has no instructions and where no instructions can be found bar vague title descriptions, the stuff is about as useful as a freshly squeezed turd.
I'm trying to get a programmer for the Tiny85 but so far everything I've bought has been trash. It's very discouraging.
If you are referring to the plastic box with the ribbon cable in your post #1, then it looks like a copy of an Atmel AVR ISP (Mk2?). Providing it works, then it should be able to program a Tiny85.
I've just checked my genuine AVR ISP Mk2 and it has a 6-way ribbon cable coming out of it. Yours looks like a 10-way ribbon cable. I think that there is a small dongle you can buy that will convert 10-way connector into 6-way. However, if you need to make yourself a small board to hold the Tiny85 whilst programming it, then you could fit a 10-way header.
As far as I know, an STK500 is a development board and looks something like this:
It is for sure that ATtiny85 chip on the 8-pin socket of yor HW-260 Breakout Board does not contain Digispark Bootloader Programmer. You can use a Programmer to load the said Bootloader Program into the ATtiny85 chip. After that you install the driver, the HW-260 will be dectected by your Windows PC as a USB Device.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. The original STK500 connected to the host computer via an rs232 port; it makes sense to replace that with a USB/Serial converter in more "modern" implementations. All you need is a proper Serial device drive for the chip (looks like a CH340 "equivalent"), and to tell avrdude the COM port that should appear.
