Arduino as an ISP

By -
Yesterday, while experimenting with my Veroduino board, I managed to destroy its boot loader. Annoying, but not a show-stopper; I'd recently built the USBTinyISP from Adafruit, and felt sure I could quickly restore the corrupt boot loader.

Revenge of Windows 7

Not that simple, alas.

I attached my USBTiny to my Windows laptop. It runs Windows 7, which refuses to load unsigned drivers without some fairly vigorous persuasion. Even when persuaded, it would not load the driver for the USBTiny. I think the driver may not not compatible with my laptop's 64-bit AMD processor. After an hour of  unsuccessful experimentation I decided to try something else.

My next two attempts also failed. I can drive the USBTiny using avrdude on one of my Linux servers, but I can't install the latest Arduino IDE on that machine. The server is is running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and I can't upgrade it easily. Its main job is to act as VMware host to a bevy of virtual servers, and VMware server currently needs patching before it will run on Karmic. I'd have to coax avrdude into some tricky fuse setting; it's easy to brick a chip if you get that wrong. I decided not to try.

Next I tried to use one of the virtual servers. It's running Ubuntu Karmic, and the Arduino IDE installs and runs, but it won't recognise the USBTiny. I suspect VMWare's virtual USB drivers are getting in the way.

Arduino to the rescue

Then I came across an article on the main Arduino website which explained how to use the Arduino as an ISP. It took about five minutes to wire the Arduino up to my Veroduino clone, and a minute later the Veroduino had a working boot loader again. Even better, I can use the same approach to program other Atmel chips, including my stock of ATMega8s.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t...
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac...
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi...
Read more