Victory is Mine

Posted in Arduino, Electronics, Making - September 16, 2011 - 0 Comment

As I suspected in my previous post, I did put the ICSP header on my boards backwards (or more accurately, flipped along its long axis). As a result, I burned up the chip on one of the boards when I plugged the ICSP header in. I also took a closer look at the chip that I had populated two of the boards with, an ATMega48, and found that it doesn’t have a separate bootloader section. The quicker wits among you are realizing that I should have checked that before I soldered it down.

Since one board had a chip that had been operating as a resistive heater, and the other two had chips I didn’t want to use, I was left with one good board.This evening, I managed to burn the Arduino bootloader to that board.

First, I threw together an adapter to flip the ICSP header back to the right layout. Using that and my trusty USBTinyICSP, I programmed the fuses for the chip like so:

avrdude -c usbtiny -p m8 -P usb -B 32 -U lfuse:w:0xc4:m hfuse:w:0xca:m efuse:w:0xFF:m

and burned in the arduino bootloader like so:

avrdude -c usbtiny -p m8 -P usb -B 32 -U ./arduino-0022/hardware/arduino/bootloaders/atmega8/ATmegaBOOT.hex

For the curious, the fuse settings are the same as the ones for the Arduino, as documented here, but with the clock selection set to 8MHz internal clock rather than 16Mhz external clock. I used this fuse calculator to find the proper values.

Since that seemed to have worked, I removed the chips from the other three boards, replaced them with ATMega8s, and put bootloaders on them as well. Now I’m going to add IC sockets for the motor driver chips and see if I can get an LED blink program onto them.