I recently upgraded to Arduino 1.6.13, and found that I could no longer program my boards with my Chinese USBasp clone programmer. When the Arduino IDE tried to load the firmware with my USBasp, AVRDUDE couldn’t find my USBasp, and gave this error:
avrdude: error: could not find USB device with vid=0x16c0 pid=0x5dc vendor=’www.fischl.de’ product=’USBasp’
It turns out that the that AVRDUDE 6.3, which is bundled with Arduino 1.6.10+, has timing issues with USBasps. The fix is to replace your libUSB-win32 driver with libusbK v3.0.7.0. An easy way to install libusbK v3.0.7.0 is to use zadig. Download the zadig from
Plug your USBasp into your PC.
Launch zadig, and from the menubar, select Options->List All Devices
Next, from the top listbox, select USBasp.
From the Driver selector box, click the up or down arrow key until libusbK (v3.0.7.0) appears.
Finally, click the Replace Driver button.
The screen should look like this:
You do not have to reboot or disconnect/reconnect your USBasp. After Zadig finishes installing libusbK, AVRDUDE 6.3 will start working correctly with your USBasp.
NOTE: the version of AVRDUDE that Arduino 1.6.x uses is actually controlled by the Boards Manager (Tools->Board->Boards Manager). Even if you have a version of Arduino 1.6.x prior to 1.6.10, if your Arduino AVR Boards by Arduino is version 1.6.10+, it will use AVRDUDE 6.3.