Bootloaderer

Background

My original project (MyISPShield) has been superseded by my build of Lady Ada's version. I found a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket on E-bay (from China) for a surprisingly low price (2.27 shipped). Or course I ordered one, but it didn't come in more than a month and they shipped a replacement part. I got tired of waiting and ordered one from adafruit (it was only $3 and got to me in less than a week). The ZIF socket order from China finally came in the very day that my replacement part I ordered from adafruit came in. Murphy loves irony.

This is definitely one of the nicer projects out there. I feel a little guilty that I only bought the ZIF socket from adafruit, and used a shield that I bought from China - an adafruit clone from what I can see except it comes assembled and is half the price. In this case, an unassembled card would probably be better since I had to desolder some of the headers. The adafruit example did the wiring on the top side but I like to hide the wiring so I did it on the back. I used some solid wire which is pretty inflexible.

I tried the programmer on one of the processors from Screwduino and it worked great. The programmer works very fast and the buzzer is a kewl touch and it actually fit into the A3 and ground holes without any wires.. This is also a better design since it doesn't need a resonator as it uses a PWM output from the base board as the clock to the part being programmed. 

Here's a link to the ladyada code that makes it all work. Here's the code that I used when I ran mine (in case it changes on the adafruit site later).

The purpose of this project is to program a bootloader into a blank ATMEGA328P-PU.

Procedure

• Attach Bootloaderer shield to base Arduino UNO board
• Connect USB port of base Arduino UNO board to Host Computer
• Launch Arduino IDE on Host Computer
• Set Board (if not already set) to Arduino UNO
• Load OptiLoader sketch in Arduino IDE
• Set Serial port 
• Tools, Serial Port, (Select port) 
• Click Upload in IDE to send OptiLoader onto the base Arduino UNO board
• Launch Serial Monitor
• Tools, Serial Monitor
• If garbled characters come up make sure baud rate is set to 19,200 baud 
• Load part into programming socket and secure with latch
• In the terminal window text extry location, enter G [ENTER].
• Result should look like the following: 

Type 'G' or hit RESET for next chip

OptiLoader Bootstrap programmer.
2011 by Bill Westfield (WestfW)

Target power on! ...
Starting Program Mode [OK]

Reading signature:9514
Searching for image...
  Found "optiboot_atmega328.hex" for atmega328
  Start address at 7E00
  Total bytes read: 502

Setting fuses for programming
  Lock: 3F FFE000  Low: FF FFA000  High: DE FFA800  Ext: 5 FFA400

Programming bootloader: 512 bytes at 0x3F00
  Commit Page: 3F00:3F00
  Commit Page: 3F40:3F40
  Commit Page: 3F80:3F80
  Commit Page: 3FC0:3FC0

Restoring normal fuses
  Lock: 2F FFE000

Target power OFF!

Type 'G' or hit RESET for next chip