I've been using the basic SoftwareSerial but since this fine new core supports NewSoftSerial I'm going to try that as soon as I get the hardware working.
I could not get SoftwareSerial to work. Even at 2400 baud it still sent a considerable amount of garbage. I suspect it's more sensitive to the clock frequency.
I naively thought we could just tell the compiler the bootloader code was to be loaded at the end of the flash- there's usually an assembly construct for that kind of thing isn't there?
Huh. I hadn't thought of that. I suspect you're right.
By the way, the core seems fine
Glad to hear!
Running my pololu programmer from the ide is giving me a content mismatch but i bet that's my fingers
I sometimes get a similar error when there's too much load on a pin (a piezo is my source of pain). Programming works. Verifying doesn't. I have no idea why one would work but not the other. If there's nothing else connected to the processor, my Pololu has been very reliable.
crossloading it thru avr studio and my dragon works fine
That might get tedious!
see, the bootloader would be a blessing today!
You're preaching to the choir! Unfortunately, it will be a considerable amount of time before I can get to it. I believe René Bohne and Peter Knight are trying to get Optiboot to work with the ATtiny84. They are far better equipped to build the bootloader than I am.
There's actually something worth thinking about there: with our own bootloader we know exactly who's doing what. with an arbitrary icsp programming set up there's more variation at the user end and maybe more bits to get wrong.
That definately seems to be true!