Hi all! We've got a new revision of the Atmel Brainboard ready for you. It adds some more functionality, and removes the breadboard space to make it cleaner (but can be added back on via the expansion bus - will be announced shortly). Check it out!
Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches.
The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips.
We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, as that lets us be absolutely sure the fuses are set correctly and the burn is correct. Interestingly enough, this last batch of chips refused to work with our batch files. Asking the chip's ID often returned 0x01 0x03 0X05 instead of the expected signature.
After spending a day checking to see if the programmer was broken (nope) or if the chips were fake (nope, we think), we did find that they did respond to regular old ICSP (in-circuit serial programming), but only partially.
Digging around, we found some older ATMega328 chips that worked fine, and compared them to this new batch. This troublesome batch has a date code of 1015 (15th week of 2010), and a batch code on the bottom as 9J4302 / 35473d / 1-P1015 e3.
So we re-wrote our batch file burning code to use AVRDude instead of the STK500 command-programmer, and to run it in ICSP mode on the STK500. The key addition is the "-B" part, which slows down the communication a bit. You want it as low as possible for fastest burn times. I tried a "-B 2" on both fuse & programming lines, but that really slowed the process. What's below is what we settled on.
: Set fuse bits, lock bits, voltages
.avrdude -c stk500v2 -i 20 -p m328p -P COM1 -b 115200 -B 1.8 -e -u -U lock:w:0x3f:m -U efuse:w:0x05:m -U hfuse:w:0xDA:m -U lfuse:w:0xFF:m
: Burn & Lock Arduino hex bootloader file
.avrdude -c stk500v2 -p m328p -P COM1 -b 115200 -B 1.1 -U flash:w:%HEXFILE% -U lock:w:0x0f:m
Hope that'll save anybody else from blowing better part of a day figuring out why their Atmel isn't programming normally!
Hi all! We've got a new revision of the Atmel Brainboard ready for you. It adds some more functionality, and removes the breadboard space to make it cleaner (but can be added back on via the expansion bus - will be announced shortly). Check it out!
Hoped you ordered one while you had the chance - they're all gone now! I will most likely be a looong time before these come back, so please don't contact us asking for more - it was a rare deal for Solarbotics, which we were glad to bring to you for as long as it […]
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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.