Philba,
I understand your point, however you don't see ours well
I'm in contact with Atmel FAE who knows what and how we do. A while ago he suggested me to send e-mail to
avr@atmel.com with request for Debug wire specs. I did and no reply whatsoever so far...
To not work with the specs from the vendor is nightmare - we learned our leasons with Picstart+/PIC-MCP.
We had to reverse engineer all the messages and the protocol just having the PIC programming specs, it took around one year until we found what does every byte/bit in the protocol. Microchip meanwhile is releasing new PICs almost every month and to make things worse the programming algorightms are so different than you can think that these PICs are not made in one and same company. We have one engineer dedicated just to follow ups the new releases of MPLAB and to make the firmware upgrades.
This is expensive approach and working on our tiny margins such extensive reverse engineering is non sense. As I wrote above we learned our leasons with Picstart+ and will not going to jump in the same trap with AVR debug wire. To clone the existing hardware - yes
to douplicate the Atmel JTAG development work and to release device at fraction of the cost - no, sorry.
Tsvetan
