Month: February 2013

Modkit Micro Alpha

Posted in Uncategorized - February 5, 2013 - 0 Comment

Modkit Micro Alpha does not run on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit without the user moving some directories around and installing ia32-libs.

It also does not save projects more than once per launch, or compile code at all, on Ubuntu or Mac OSX.

I appreciate that the point of Modkit’s Kickstarter campaign was not to sell a finished product, but to get the money to produce one. That said, people who have paid money for a thing may want that thing to work. Modkit is now in the uncomfortable position of having sold the moon, and being expected to deliver it.

ToyBrain Version 2 Firmware Troubles

Posted in Arduino, Electronics, ToyBrain - February 5, 2013 - 0 Comment

I’ve started trying to load a bootloader onto the V2 hardware for the ToyBrains, as part of attempting to make a luminous fez for my girlfriend. I ran into a few problems.

The first problem I had was that the IC I’m using is the ATMega328, not the ATMega328P. So far, the only difference I can find between the two is their voltage range, but they have different ID strings. To get around this, I duplicated the chip definition for the 328P in avrdude.conf, and replaced the ID with the proper ID for a 328 (no P). This seemed to work for getting the Arduino IDE to burn the bootloader to my chip.

Unfortunately, I had made the Arduino boards.txt file description of my board by copying the Arduino Nano section. This includes a fuse setting for an external clock crystal. The toybrain boards don’t have a clock crystal, and use the internal RC oscillator of the Atmega328 instead. This meant that when the board was reflashed, it had no clock, and so not only could it not be programmed from the IDE, it also couldn’t be reflashed with a new bootloader using the USBTinyISP. The big symptom of this is that avrdude immediately fails to init, and if I used the -F (force, which you should never do) flag, it reported a part ID of 0x000000.

To fix that problem, I wired two small caps and a crystal to add an external oscillator to the board, tacked it to the appropriate pins, and reset the flags.

At this point, I think I have the bootloader installed, and the fuses at least mostly correct. The Lilypad Arduino with the ATMega328P uses these fuses: Low: 0xE2 High: 0xD8 Extended: 0x05, which mean that the clock is internal, and not divided by 8, so it runs at 8MHz. The bootloader settings set the size of the bootloader, which is the same as the one I am using (ATmegaBOOT_168_atmega328_pro_8MHz.hex), and the boot interrupt vector.

However, I still get a problem when I attempt to upload a program to the device. If I set the upload speed to 57600, avrdude beefs about the chip ID. If I set it to 19200, avrdude says the programmer is not responding.

My current guesses at the cause of the problem are these:

  • My clock settings are slightly off, so the chip is running at the wrong speed for the bootloader. As a result, the serial data rate is bad, and the data that avrdude gets back is nonsense. This can be fixed by applying the above fuse settings via the USBTinyICSP.
  • I have the reset vector or bootloader size setting wrong, and so the chip doesn’t start the bootloader correctly when it is reset. Again, this is a matter of fixing the fuses.
  • Something else that I haven’t considered yet, e.g. there is something wrong with my hardware.

I’m going to work on it more tonight and see if I can get it going.