john1993:
yes, so far so good. im going to try a few different devices and loading some really big flash self-check images later today but dont anticipate problems.since you seem to be on top of this stuff more than most i have another quickie. the official 1284 bootloaders use uart 0 but the ones i got from tom carpenter use uart 1. there was mention here of issues with uart 0. do you know anything about this? which is most popular and closest to a standard?
I can answer that one. There seemed to be a die bug in the 1284p chip that would/could cause intermittent errors on input data stream to UART 0. It was discussed a lot over at the AVRfreaks web site. Users have reported a 'fix' if you wire a low pass filter (single small cap & resistor) network between the uart0 rec pin and the source of the transmitted data. Not sure if newer die versions of the chip have fixed the 'bug' or not. As such several have just modified their bootloader code to use UART 1 just to avoid the problem. As I said the avrfreak site had more detailed information on this problem.
http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=index
Lefty