I ordered some tools and parts yesterday, from Adafruit. The parts are just more of the same: lights, resistors, etc. The tool is a USBtinyISP, an in-system/in-circuit programmer for most of the the 8-bit Atmel microcontrollers.
The USBtinyISP is $22, compared to the official Atmel USB ISP mk2, at $33. Neither supports JTAG or debugWire, but I find it hard to complain at those prices. They seem comparable at the feature level. The Atmel AVRISP mk2 is potentially faster, since Lady Ada's design uses a software USB implementation, which only runs at USB low-speed mode, or 1.5Mbps. The Atmel ISP is full speed, although programming only takes a few seconds either way.
The Adafruit design does support some bit-banging operations, though, and the ISP is based on a generic ATtiny 2313, so I can ransack and pillage the firmware as necessary. Perhaps debugWire can be added on this way.
I'll have a tidy review up after I receive it and get a chance to get down to business with it.
With the ISP, I can grow a bit away from the Arduino projects. I'm looking forward to programming bare ATmega and ATtiny microcontrollers, and making them do my bidding!
