i thought of much more today, but i didn't get around to writing it.

Been looking at all sorts of stuff. Thinking of cheaper ways to program AVR's, that kinda thing.

Looking at prototype boards and the like. Sparkfun has one with the FTDI USB->serial chip... but they don't bring out the ports I'd need to manually program an AVR chip. *fail*. In fact pretty much all of Sparkfun's parts using the FTDI chip don't break out the lines I'd need. *moar fail*

See, I want to design a bit-banging board with a 4-40 pin ZIF socket wired up to a 40-pin header (and lots of grounds nearby) - then you could adjust it to program anything that you could program by bit-banging 3-4 pins. More advanced versions could have a surface-mount AVR, and perhaps even a big CPLD with adjustable voltage converters. The latter might even let me program the pesky GAL chips.