PonyProg release 3.0 comes with modern UI

PonyProg is a software application that can read, write and program various memory chips and microcontrollers using the simplest possible interface: a serial port adapter. This adapter consist of only some resistors and some voltage limiting zener diodes. However, this approach has a big downside nowadays. It doesn't work with USB to serial converters. And computers with a real serial port are becoming very rare.

If you still have an older computer with a motherboard serial port, you may take into consideration building the serial adapter used by PonyProg, because it is easy to build and probably the cheapest programmer possible. The schematic of the interface can be found at the author's page (SI-Prog by Claudio Lanconelli).

Currently, PonyProg only support SI-Prog or other serial based programmers and some parallel port programmers. With serial port, it communicates by bit-banging various protocols to the signaling lines contained in the RS232 interface (RTS, CTR and DTR). It would be nice if a future version would support the modern USB based programmers (like the CH341A MiniProgrammer) which lack a good software.

PonyProg 3.0 main window after reading an I2C EEPROM

Compile and setup PonyProg on Ubuntu

PonyProg is a device programming software for the SI Prog serial interface programmer designed by Claudio Lanconelli. The latest version of the PonyProg software can be found on SourceForge, but there are no Ubuntu packages.

Here is how to compile it on Ubuntu. This post was updated for Ubuntu 16.10. First you'll have to install some development libraries:

sudo apt install build-essential libxt-dev libxmu-dev libxaw7-dev

Then download the archive from SourceForge and extract it to some folder you want (at the time of writing this, the latest version is 2.08d).