ArduinoISP – avrdude

For those of us that have been receiving the avrdude error “” when uploading sketches using the Arduino Uno as an ISP, I have found the following modified version of the ArduinoISP.ino.

I’ve had a look through the sketch and it would appear that the main difference between the two is the inclusion of the SPI library in the header and then later in the sketch setup, the SPI library is included.

Unfortunately, the version number in the ino file is still 04m3, it would have been nice to change that ;) but, woteva.

I would also like to change the pin assignment for the LED indicator lights as there is a lot of cramping around pins 13 – 10 … it would be nice if the LED pins were outside of this area. I’m going to change the pins to

// 3: Heartbeat   - shows the programmer is running
// 2: Error       - Lights up if something goes wrong (use red if that makes sense)
// 1: Programming - In communication with the slave

#define LED_HB    3
#define LED_ERR   2
#define LED_PMODE 1

Pin 3 on the Arduino is PWM so it should still work for doing the heartbeat pulse, hopefully it doesn’t conflict with something I’ve missed.

The above Fritzing diagram shows the wiring layout using pins 3, 2, and 1 for the LED indicators and assumes that the sketch has been changed accordingly.

I’ll make the changes tonight and try to reload the blink sketch to the ATTiny85 and see if there are still any avrdude errors appearing in the IDE.

Okay, so I’ve tried it with 3, 2, 1 and it appears that 1 is interfering with TX, so I’ve changed it to 3, 2, 4 instead, now the new ArduinoISP sketch has loaded successfully, it’s on to loading the blink sketch onto the ATTiny85.

No … that didn’t work …

back to 9, 8, 7 for the monitoring pins. Still a no go … so it’s back to the original ArduinoISP.ino and just deal with getting the avrdude error … how disappointing … I’ll work on that more later.

UPDATE: I’ve looked into this problem some more and it appears that there may be a fix to the avrdude.conf that could resolve the issue. Check out my article AVRDUDE PAGEL and BS2 for more information. I will be updating that article when I have tested the suggested fix.