This is just a short post about how I finally, after considerable troubleshooting, got my attiny85 programmed. I followed the High-Low Tech guide for programming my attiny85 with the Arduino Uno. However when I tried to upload the blink sketch to the attiny I got a bunch of errors(e.g. avrdude: stk500_cmd(): programmer is out of sync, avrdude: stk500_paged_write(): (a) protocol error). I rechecked everything (software, wiring, etc) way too many times just to run into the same problem again and again. Finally, what worked was to distribute grounds to various GND pins on the Arduino board. Now I’m not exactly sure which one did the trick, but anyway everything works flawlessly now. Actually the trick is to drop the baud rate to 9600 in the Arduino ISP program, and also edit the programmers.txt in the arduino > hardware folder.
avrisp.name=AVR ISP
avrisp.communication=serial
avrisp.protocol=stk500v1
avrispmkii.name=AVRISP mkII
avrispmkii.communication=usb
avrispmkii.protocol=stk500v2
usbtinyisp.name=USBtinyISP
usbtinyisp.protocol=usbtiny
usbasp.name=USBasp
usbasp.communication=usb
usbasp.protocol=usbasp
parallel.name=Parallel Programmer
parallel.protocol=dapa
parallel.force=true
# parallel.delay=200
arduinoisp.name=Arduino as ISP
arduinoisp.communication=serial
arduinoisp.protocol=stk500v1
arduinoisp.speed=9600
Hope this helps someone out there experiencing the same problem.
