I have a known working Atmega8 and I put it on a bread board and it work fine. I have a 16MHZ crystal and I wired in a LED to the digital out 13 pin and that works fine. Then I wired in a USB to serial adapter from SparkFun, ran TX to Rx and Rx to TX and put a .1uf reset cap from pin 1 of the reset line (pin 1) to the DTR of the USB to serial device.
Now, Windows recognizes the USB Com port as Com8 as does the Arduino IDE. I select Com8 and the correct board which is Arduino NG with Atmega8, load the blink command and change the digital out pin from 13 to 12 and then upload it.
I get this error:
Binary sketch size: 318 bytes (of a 7168 byte maximum)
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51
It works fine in the Arduino board itself, but not on the bread board. I thought maybe it was the serial device so I set it up for a loopback test and enter data in the serial port monitor and hit send and recieved back exactly what I sent it.
I am at a loss as to why I am unable to upload anything. I even tried changing baud rates both in the boards.txt file and in device manager, but get the same error.
I even just tried uploading the basic file and still no luck. The led on digital out 13 flashes rapidly for a second maybe and the TX led on the usb to serial device flashes for a bit and then stops. The RX led never does anything.
Anyone have any ideas? Is there any kind of serial protocol anaylyzer I can use with a usb to serial device to see what information is being sent and what is received back while the Arduino IDE is uploading?