AVR butterfly - issue with serial loading

Mar 02, 2007 3 Replies
S

I'm planning on making the move from PIC to AVR for my next project but I'm running into a very frustrating hurdle. I'm having trouble programming my AVR butterfly over serial using the bootloader. The wiring seems very straight forward, 3 wires pretty sure that is ok since there's pin numbers in the manual and I can read the pin numbers right on the cable. On the butterfly side I put the battery in, start the demo app and go through the menus to jump to bootloader and then press the center of the joystick and the screen goes blank, so I assume its waiting for the loader. I downloaded winAVR and build some of the example projects, but when I use avrdude it gets to the point where it says 'Connecting to programmer' and it just sits there. I then downloaded AVRstudio4 and tried AVRprog and it says cannot find programmer 1.40 or something like that. My os is WinXP and I'm connecting to com1.



It doesn't seem like it should be this difficult. It has to be some rookie mistake I'm making. Please help!



Scott



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S

when you jump to the bootloader and the screen goes blank you are in the bootloader, but not in the download mode, after running avrdude when it says "Connecting to programmer" it's waiting for you to press the joystick down again, then the downloading will begin

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S

Thanks for the tip, I was actually trying that but I did not know it was necessary. It turns out that my serial port was taken by some thread and rebooting solved it. Just as I thought it was a rookie move on my part.

avrprog now works for me but avrdude is still giving trouble. It detects the bootloader but then gives and error saying it can't read lfuse properly, then aborts the programming citing safety reasons. What is an lfuse? If someone could explain this issue or point me to a resource it would be greatly appreciated!

Scott

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L

It's the low byte of the fuse bits. avrdude tries to be smart by doing some readbacks before it will burn the chip; this is to prevent you from (say) locking out ISP or disabling the only operable oscillator.

If you are working on Windows, use avrprog (built into AVR Studio). It's less problematic. avrdude is quite fussy to get working.

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