AVR Freaks

Olimex suggest buying their adapter.   https://www.olimex.com/Products/AVR/Programmers/AVR-ICSP/

Or making your own.

If you make your own,  make sure that you use keyed header sockets.   Or mark pin #1 if you have naked 5x2 and 3x2 male header strip.

Most commercial boards follow the Atmel 3x2 convention with pin#1 identified by white dot, arrow, and a square copper pad on the pcb.

I strongly advise using keyed male headers and IDC ribbon cables.   Then there is no possibility of error.

Flying wires are not only unreliable but make my head hurt.

It is well worth your time and effort to make a breadboard compatible 3x2 e.g. with some header strip and a scrap of protoboard.

David.

Yes,  your wiring looks correct.  You seem to be using a 3x2 shell for the Uno end.   So that will be 100% reliable with properly crimped Dupont connectors.

The 5x2 end is indeterminate.   The "wires" are in the right order but it does not look like Dupont crimped males or even soldered male header strip.

Stuffing "wires" into a female IDC socket is suspect.    Especially multi-strand flexible wires.

Seriously,   it is worth doing this carefully.

If you have an intermittent connection part way through programming,  anything can happen.   e.g. fuses.

David.

Hint.   Write down the list of signals.   Assign the wire colour for each signal.

This means you can check your wiring easily.   (and so can your readers)

In the days before USB and USBASP punters would use "printer port" adapters.   These were very prone to glitches.     This Forum spent a lot of time commiserating.

Typically,   a glitch would program fuses with 0x00.    Which would require external clock to recover.

I suspect that you have had a similar mishap at some stage.     Your current soldered joints should be 100% good.   Apply an external clock to XTAL1 pin.

David.

That should never happen nowadays.   Your Olimex should be 100% reliable.    If you have a good cable / adapter / connections then every programming job should work first time.

Life is simpler now.    Just buy a Uno clone.    Buy a purpose made shield.    Or hand-wire a Protoshield with your external electronics.

For "quick and dirty",   put external electronics on a breadboard.   Connect breadboard to Uno with (not many) flying wires.

When the prototype works ok,   solder the external electronics onto a Protoshield.

You never need an external programmer.   You seldom need a debugger.

If you do,   just plug the Protoshield onto an XMINI-328

David.

Google ' Gammon bootloader', lots of help there too on how to burn those boot loaders, he has some excellent tutorials and code

I think that requires additional hardware.

Only another Arduino and few jumper wires. 

you probably also need to disable the auto-reset on the "programmer" arduino.

You don't need to disable auto-reset.   The "programming" is enabled by the RESET line on the target which is controlled by the ArduinoISP sketch on the ArduinoISP Arduino.

The COM port is set for the ArduinoISP Arduino.

Since you possess the Olimex,  life is much simpler when you use the Olimex as external programmer instead of ArduinoISP sketch running on another Arduino.

David.