Jim's blog that's just a place for stashing pictures for forums.

The Pocket AVR Programmer from SparkFun is a nifty (and inexpensive) little device for Arduino users.  You can use it to flash a bootloader to a new atmega chip, or to program your Arduino without using the bootloader.

Another plus: it’s fast.  Really fast.  When you’re used to programming via the built-in interface, you’ll be amazed at how fast your program flashes.

But there’s a fly in the ointment: the drivers for it won’t load under Windows 7.  Windows 7 (like Vista) will only load drivers that have been signed with a security key, and the drivers from SparkFun aren’t signed.

Some people recommend using a tool to disable the signing check, but doing so will arguably increase your security risk.  Instead, follow the following steps to create an updated set of drivers for Windows 7.

1. Download the windows driver from sparkfun, and unzip it somewhere.
2. Download a recent libusb release from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb-win32/files/libusb-win32-releases/
   and unzip it somewhere.
3. Take the libusb0.dll and libusb0.sys files from the sourceforge binamd64 directory, rename them to libusb0_x64.dll and libusb0_x64.sys, and replace those files in the sparkfun driver directory.
4. Replace the sparkfun libusb0.sys and libusb0.dll with copies from the sourceforge binx86 directory (renaming the sourceforge libusb0_x86.dll to libusb0.dll).

Your driver is now ready to go. Windows will complain during the install that the drivers aren’t signed, but they actually are. Once installation is done, Windows will happily load the new drivers.