Mittwoch, 17. September 2008

Writing Software and Burning Atmega8

Currently i've finished the controller hardware part and the software. At the moment i'm trying to test the software. Problem is that i've managed to burn four Atmega8 microcontrollers while trying to program them. For those of you not familiar with Atmel's microcontroller see Wikipedia or AVR freaks. Unfortunately things get expensive quickly once you burned some of them. So i spent hours testing the boards where the atmega's were mounted but couldn't find any errors. Since i've done all my programming with a cheap home-built programmer in the end i suspected the programmer to damage the atmega's. So i forced myself to spend 80 euros for a 'real' programmer (the avr dragon) with this i hope to prevent damaging more micros and even bringing to life the 'dead' ones. The software will be published (und GPL) once working.

2 Kommentare:

wesen hat gesagt…

I had similar problems when programming from parallel port, I then built an usb programmer and all gone :) A laptop can produce some nasty spikes on the parallel port, that will even go through a protection buffer.

Philipp hat gesagt…

Recently i bought a AVR Dragon (usb-based programming device from Atmel) which i wired for parallel high-voltage programming, when i plugged in the 'dead' avr i found out that some reasons the 'dead' avr's had all fuses programmed, apart from that they still worked! Fortunately the money on the AVR Dragon was well spent!. But still i'm working on an optically decoupled programmer working with the parallel port since the the ISP pin-outs on the target board are not compatible with the dragon, also i'm a little bit afraid of burning the dragon (i found out that there might be some problems with ground loops). I'll keep you informed!