WinXP Driver Issues

I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 (up to date). Bare-Bones Board with the Decimilia. I've successfully uploaded a program to it from a computer at School (I'm a teacher), but I've been unable to get one of our laptops or my home computer to work with it.

I get the following error message
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51

Which seems to mean the chip is not responding (according to stuff I've found on the web). I've confirmed that the proper port and board are selected from the Tools menu (and then changed them to the others to see what would happen). I've tried the latest drivers from the FTDI website and the drivers that came with arduino-0010. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers. Restarted the computer repeatedly. Done a system restore to yesterday and tried it all again.

Symptoms:
I have an LED plugged into pin 13 (the BBB doesn't include one). This LED will blink seemingly randomly for a couple of seconds when I plug in the FTDI TTL-232R cable and then the program I loaded previously will start. When I try to upload a new program the old one will stop and after a few more seconds I get the error message I listed above. The old program remains stopped until I hit the reset button, at which point it starts up again.

Stuff I've tried:

  • Upload a second time while program is stopped
  • Tried uploading while the LED does its mad blinking when I first plug it in
  • Pushed reset just prior to uploading
  • Pushed reset just after uploading

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I was hoping to use the pile of these that I just soldered together with my students on Monday, but this will be difficult if I have only one computer that will work.

Can you try pressing reset button with different timming after clicking upload button? 5 seconds after, 10 seconds after...

Apparently 3-5 seconds from upload to reset works, but on the computer at school (running Win2k) no reset is needed.

Why would this be?

Thanks, btw for recommending a timing change.

Unless I'm mistaken, your BBB uses an FTDI cable. You should ensure 'set RTS on close' is enabled.
The best tutorial is from Ladyada's Boarduino page (look for 'Arduino-compatibility' about half way down).