Hardware To Software

The beauty of micro controllers is that some operations can be achieved in more than a single way.

When you buy them you generally get them free of any software or – better – firmware, totally virgin and ready only to be inserted onto your board.
Sometimes they are bootloaded, that’s necessary to communicate with some other specific hardware: ATMega is a good example.
Thanks to Arduino board’s popularity is easy to find ATMega microcontrollers directly set to work with it. Read the rest of this entry »

In this article we will present one possible method to put a bootloader into a virgin Arduino‘s ATMega 328P.
We’ll utilize :

• Arduino 2009 board with power supply (via USB from PC or external);
• A virgin ATMega 328P micro controller;
• 4 wires.

Wire close up 1

Wire close up 2

Wire close up 3

Read the rest of this entry »

You have an Arduino board and you bought a new ATMega328 microcontroller for new projects; after mounted it onto the board you discovered it doesn’t work.
Why this?

In picture beside we can see something interesting: “avrdude” and specially “not in sync“; simply it’s impossible to communicate or send datas to ATMega: it’s not ready!

“Ready? what does it mean“!?
Think you have a baby: he’s not ready to take care of himself, but you are, both for him and for you!

Same with microcontroller: control it by external hardware (adult to baby), or give it (baby) the way to become indipendent.

We’re covering this second aspect, that needs a little piece of code.