Arduino Bootloader with Olimex AVR-ISP500

The new flight hardware will effectively be an Arduino Pro at its core. As I’m planning on using surface mount chips I won’t be able to use the existing Arduino Duemilanove boards I have to burn the bootloader. So I purchased a Olimex AVR-ISP500. I built the customised Arduino Pro on some prototyping boards and tried to get the bootloader on.

Initially I got alot of errors, a quick hunt round the Arduino forums indicates to get the bootloader to work with the AVR-ISP500 you need to amend programmers.txt in ..\arduino-0023\hardware\arduino :


avrisp.name=AVR ISP
avrisp.communication=serial
avrisp.protocol=stk500v2

Another little trick I discovered is you can program the Arduino using the ICSP programmer. Amend the

C:\Users\<<username>>\AppData\Roaming\Arduino\preferences.txt file and add :

upload.using = avrisp

That done it all works nicely. The board is now running at 3.3v so the GPS is happy. However the crystal I have is a 16Mhz one. I think its leading to some timing errors when using software serial. I switched to New Software Serial which is better but still having a few errors. I’ll switch out the 16Mhz crystal with the correct 8Mhz one shortly.

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