There are, to start this article with wording we wouldn’t normally use, very few areas of our world which are not touched by controversy from time to time. Our area of expertise – programmers, chips and other forms of electronic tools – is by no means an exception to this. If we were asked to identify one area in particular which has been controversial over the years, it is with little or no hesitation that we’d say universal programmers.
We believe it would be fair to suggest that if you asked anyone, irrespective of what their level of understanding of electronic tools and programming was, what their understanding of universal programmers were the answers would be the same. The answer we would expect is that it’s a form of programmer capable of handling a very broad range of devices through different methods of connectivity. This answer, as an expectation, is one we consider to be entirely correct.
A problem which has sometimes plagued our industry, however, is that some have been quite misleading with their use of the term “universal”. There have been a number of instances where people have claimed to supply programmers only for them to work just with different versions of the same core component, rather than with actual different systems.
Our approach is to always make sure that “universal” really does mean this. An example of this is our exceptionally popular VP-290 Programmer, a model which we have been able to recently reduce the price of. It is compatible with a significant range of devices, including PIC, AVR and EEPROMs. It also works with PLDs and flash memory.
If your projects or working requirements mean that you need to carry out programming across multiple platforms then a universal programmer makes sense. We do not believe it is unreasonable for you to expect something with a name like that to work on virtually all possible chipsets and platforms. As the leading name for the supply of the devices, we can be trusted to provide you with the precise form of programmer you need.