I did some development on AVR a few years ago, now trying to get back into it after about 4-5 years of hiatus. Using the exact same hardware as 5 years ago (same USBasp programmer with home-soldered DIP8 socket, same batch of microcontroller units, and same computer for doing the uploading), and the avrdude command from the same old Makefile, I get the "avrdude error: program enable: target does not answer (0x01)", which basically says that there is no chip in the programmer.
The obvious culprit would be failure in the home-soldered socket; however I did check all the connections (from USBasp board to microcontroller pin), they are good (neither broken circuit nor any short-circuit) and also tried several controllers from the batch, nothing seems to fix this error. Did I miss anything obvious?
And no fuses set in the ATtiny's that will screw things up, like external clock?
(Unless they actually have external clock.."
I cannot even see the fuses in the ATTinys since the programmer doesn't let me see the microcontroller, but I don't think so: the microcontrollers are still new (right from the bag) and I did not have any difficulties programming the previous ones. I will try tonight replacing the programmer with either an Arduino or a Raspberry which I have lying around to see what is failing.
OK, problem found, and I was definitely very stupid here: it turns out that I had two bags of DIP8 chips, one of which happened to be NE555s. (I had completely forgotten about these). And while NE555s are great chips, it just turns out that they may not be programmed, who could have guessed?
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Never heard of that MCU. Ancient one? How many instructions? 