Ve7xen, I'll try it. What am I looking for? Reset will be 5v, then go low? Same with Sck? I'm don't know my way around the scope very well yet, but I can read a dc voltage.
Yeah, the ISP interface is active while ~RESET is low, so you'd see it at Vcc then drop before programming. SCK is the serial clock, so you should see it toggling at some 100s of KHz. It might only burst for some ms before giving up though, so set your trigger up at say 1V and keep your eye on the TRIG indicator when you try to program it, you might not catch it on the screen. Or if you have a digital scope, set it up to do a one-shot when RESET goes low and you should see SCK toggling shortly after.
Just waking up here. Please, bear with me. I have an older Tektronix digital scope. I'll see if it can do a one-shot. Without a function generator or AC PS, I'll have to set up something to practice catching a burst on. It does record... I think. I'll try that after I've got some coffee lapping through my veins.
As leppie mentions, did you (or anyone) ever program the fuse bytes? If this was once an Arduino ATmega it will require an external clock.
Right! I forgot to respond to leppie about that! I meant to when I first read it.
First off, wouldn't the verbose output from avrdude show whether or not it has a bootloader installed, somehow? Maybe it is showing in the output. It looks like it's stopping communication, to me. I don't know. If it is stopping, then it has to be communicating at least partially and maybe there is a bootloader on it.
I bought all my Arduino stuff maybe two years ago (that goes for all my electronics stuff). Life got in the way before I actually got around to doing anything with
any of it. Yes, basically, I've only been doing Arduino and electronics for the last month. So, I'm not an air-head, though I am old and getting more forgetful. Two years is a long time to remember, but I think I bought a few 328p's from Mouser. They shouldn't have bootloaders on the them. Some, have a sticker on the tops, labeling the pins. They're likely from Sparkfun or Adafruit. The 328p I successfully uploaded to a month ago using the rig in the photo, was without the label... so no bootloader on those. However, I
have clicked on "Upload bootloader" on the IDE menu, in frustration trying to get them to communicate. It's conceivable that the chip I've been using does now have a bootloader. I'm guessing you can tell by looking at the fuse settings? Aren't they indicated in the avrdude outputs I've posted? I don't know what that would look like. If the fuse settings are how you erase a bootloader (I believe I read that somewhere), then I'm pretty sure I tried the right settings. In Zapta's post, he showed the fuse settings he uses for blank 328ps. I tried them and got similar if not the same output. Now, if his fuse settings pre-suppose the bootloader is absent and doesn't actually erase the bootloader, I wouldn't know. What all this means is I do have chips I'm 99% sure have no bootloader. The two chips I've been using throughout this entire thread are NOT among them. I'll try one of the mouser chips before proceeding. Avrdude is like a long chain with all but the two end links screened by something impenetrable. If any one of the many links isn't welded closed, you can pull on one end link all you want with no effect on the other... Now, find the link! Frustrating.
Can anyone answer this question: With the rig I'm using, (USB powered chip, usblib driver, avrisp), in the Arduino IDE, shouldn't I see a serial port just like when programming a full-fledged arduino board using the ftdi driver?
No. The Arduino by default has a serial bootloader that allows loading code via the serial port (or some variants use DFU over USB instead, but both have custom code loaded on the AVR). A blank one from the factory won't have that serial bootloader, and your rig doesn't provide a serial port anyway. You're using the ISP programming interface that is built into the chip itself, which is based on SPI not UART. You can load such a bootloader if you want, but then you will need a serial converter as well.
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So, is there ANYTHING in the Arduino IDE that would indicate when you're connected via SPI? When connected UART, the indication is indirect... the port will appear and disappear as you plug it in. There's nothing like that happening with SPI?
I have a Sparkfun FTDI breakout board. I was going to hook it up to my rig on the breadboard to try that, but noticed it has a mini A connector. I thought I had a cable, but they're all micro and standard A's. Maybe I'll try replacing the mini port with a micro. I think I have one or two I've salvaged from old boards.