[Andrew] picked up a handful of these big STC 8051 chips for a song and dance. The problem he has with them is the clunky VB6 programming software that only wants to run on a Windows box. He buckled down and wrote his own programming software called stcdude. As you have probably guessed, it’s meant to perform the same open-source functions that avrdude does for AVR chips. It can be used in conjunction with the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC).

It uses an API which is based on Lua script. We think this is to make it easy to interface your own hardware programmer with the software. The package is still quite early in development but it is working and even implements the ability to poll and identify the type of chip based on its stored hardware database. It sounds like he could use a hand. The stock software must still be used for setting the MCU options. We’re not really familiar with the 8051 family but we’d bet that is akin to setting the fuses on the AVR chips. Please let us know in the comments if we’re wrong about that.