Arduino Boot Loader Party….
Well I was the only one there…. BUT! I did have a few different ATMEGA’s guests. I had purchased about 10x ATMEGA168V’s and 5x ATMEGA168P’s both in the SMD packages for some upcoming projects. My goal was to get a TQFP (which is just the name of the chip foot print or size if you will) socket hook it up to the SPI programming ports that ATMEL uses to flash their chips and then burn the Arduino Boot loader on to them. Well this turned out to be harder than I though.
First, the wayyyy too cheap TQFP Socket Breakout Board $25 actually when most are around $150 – $200 was too good to be true. I assumed and did not RTFM (google if it you dont know that one) that it had a standard male breadboard socket headers on the bottom to “breakout” the pins. It actually had this:
So after realizing that my whole “good idea” of removing the 6 pin headers needed to flash and arduino bootloader off of any future design and just use the “breakout board” to quickly flash these guys was starting to seem like it was not going to work. After about 4 hours of searching for the counterpart of this connector I gave up and got crazy. I went ahead and desoldered the whole enclosure popped it off solder 6 wires to the right corresponding pins needed to flash the AVR’s. I needed this to be done quickly as I had a project that’s deadline is approaching so I had to breadboard
this design rather than make a nice custom eagle footprint for this part and do a DIY PCB via the Laser.
This is where the real trouble started. I thought I had bought all ATMEGAxx8P’s when in reality I had bought ATMEGA168V’s. So my trouble was through the arduino IDE I had selected to flash these chips with the Arduino mini pro as the board selected. All this means is through the IDE the mini pro has the smd atmega168p chip which is what you would have wanted if you had the right chip.
Issuing the avrdude -c tinyisp -p m168 told me that everything was good. So then I proceeded to select Burn Boot Loader through the Arduino IDE. This failed and now I was no longer able to talk to these chips. After reading more I realized they were ATMEGA168V’s which is the same chip the lillypad uses. I selected that board on a new chip burned the bootloader and now its all working. However I did “screw up” about 6 other chips.
I posted a question on chiphackers to see if anyone could help me out. It turns out that the Arduino IDE seems to have changed the fuses on the chip to need an external oscillator. This is ok if the hex file that the arduino was trying to burn was the right one. Which it was not as I described above. So I am in the process now of trying to fix these “screwed up chips” by adding an oscillator to the xtal pins and then trying to burn them again with the right bootloader. I will update with more info when I know its fixed. Here is some more pics of the process.
