DC Boarduino loaded once, not accepting programs now.

[foober]

Hi All,

I can't see where I've gone wrong, can someone point me in the right direction?

I bought several DC Boarduino's at the Newcastle Makerfaire in the UK. I built one (it has "v1.0" on the PCB, a '328P, and an LM7805, and I put in C6), and I could swear (but I'm not completely sure that I), using the Arduino_0012 software (which only supported the 168's) successfully uploaded the blink sketch to verify it working. All's well, or so I thought. That was a month or two ago.

Last night, I tried to upload a sketch. I connected the known-good USB RTL cable the correct way, made sure power was from "usb" (the RTL cable), and tried to upload a different blink sketch. Incidentally, the usb port has the 'Set RTS on close' tick set.

The LED flickered a little bit, indicating that it was trying to communicate with my computer, and then the same blinking started again.

After a while, the IDE showed the error:
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk_500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51

Since that didn't work, I downloaded Arduino_0017, and tried compiling and uploading with that, with the board setting as 'Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ ATmega328'.

I've tried changing the setting to the various 328's, recompiling, and then uploading. I've tried changing to the 168's and uploading. I tried playing with boards.txt to see if changing the parameters helped. I've tried pushing the reset button both before and after pressing the 'upload' key.

I can't seem to even affect the behaviour. It's always the same: I click on 'Upload', the LED blinks a little bit, and then goes back to the regular flashing of the blink sketch.

Thinking that the IDE might be bogus, I then used a different cable, and downloaded to a real Arduino (changing the chip to a 168 and the port to the different port), and the sketch went in first time.

Any suggestions? The Boarduino /seems/ to be working fine, as it powers up, and blinks merrily away. The solder connections all seem good. It /seems/ to hear the USB cable, otherwise it wouldn't blink. The IDE is working because it loads into a pukka arduino. I can't pinpoint where the trouble might be.

Thanks for any help!

-Ken

[mtbf0]

have you tried different baud rates? could be a mismtch between the bootloader on the chip you have and the arduino environment you're using.

[Hinermad]

What OS is your host computer running? I had very similar problems with Arduino 0017 running under Windows Vista. I used a USBtinyISP to replace the bootloader in the DC Boarduino with the stock Arduino bootloader (can be done from within the IDE) and it works fine now.

Here's another thread with some discussion about it:

http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=12346

Dave