Dear friends,

I recently placed an order for some electronic parts and a friends asked me to order a laser diode. Now, he does not need it anymore so I got one piece of laser diode and an Arduino. What cool project can I do with them altogether?

All I can think of is a tripwire, but it is easy and useless enough.

What else can I do with them?

Thanks!

Has any of you connected a microSD card to an Atmega8, using just the Arduino IDE? Is it difficult or you just have to follow the Arduino tutorial, in the examples section?

Thank you!

Ok, thanks you. On Monday I will go to the store and try to replace it.

I also tried reading the fusebits with Khazama and the results is the same: nomcommunication with the 168, like it is not functional or the connections are faulted.

You mean place an external oscillator between the XTAL pins and two capacitors to the ground? i did that using an external 4 MHz and two 22pF capacitors and the results is the same. Is there other way to accomplish what you suggested?

Dear friends,
I bought a new Atmega168-20PU and tried to program it with my USB programmer using the Arduino IDE and got this:

avrdude: error: programm enable: target doesn't answer. 1
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
         Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
         this check.

It happened to me before when I made wrong connections, but this time I checked and triple checked the connections, the selected board and everything is ok. The programmer is ok, I succeeded in programming an Atmega8 and an Atiny2313.

Curious thing: last week I was working with another Atmega168 and, suddenly, I received the same error. I assumed that I burnt the chip and threw it away, but, considering that I get the same error weith a new and identical chip, it makes me wonder. What could be the problem?

Dear Sir,

I tried 600 baud in TeraTerm (Arduino Serial Monitor and HyperTerminal do not allow this baud rate) and I succeeded, it works. I also tried it with a sketch in Processing which listens to the serial port at a given baud rate and it also works.

What is the solution to use the actual baud rate I set in the sketch (9600)? For my present projects, even 600 is ok, but I am interested for the future. I am a little afraid to go by myself in the fusebits section, as I think I permanently damaged an Atmega168 by doing that.

Thank you again!

I set the baud to 1200 in terminal and:
1. Hyperterminal gave me "f"s every second, instead of the temperature (that was my sketch about);
2. serial monitor in Arduino IDE returned random characters (not squars this time, but random ASCII) every second.

So I guess it is not the clock?

It doesn't. Actually, I think delay(1000) is aproximately 8 seconds, if I correctly measured with the oscilloscope. Can this influence the serial transmission?

What about the schematics, was it ok?

Thank you again.

Dear friends,

I tried to connect both an Atmega8 and an Atmega168 uC to the serial port of my computer and I have the same results: just squares. Let me detail the problem:

I used a simple Arduino sketch: Serial.begin(9600) in setup() and Serial.print (sensorValue); delay (1000) in loop(). I did not used an external crystal, just the internal of both uCs. I used the schematic provided by sparkfun, found here http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/104, but connected a capacitor from 2 to ground and one from 6 to ground, in the 232 IC. I made the connections correctly, checked and double checked them. I used 3x1,5 batteries to power the chips.

I tried both hyperterminal (where I did not receive anything), and the serial monitor of the Arduino IDE, where I receive only squares, at a second (see the delay) interval. I also tried Teraterm and I had the same results.

I have Windows XP and I do not know other programming languages for the AVRs, except Arduino IDE and Processing.

What am I missing? Can any of you who tried this post some schematic with an AVR and the MAX232? Is it the code (which, as you guessed, works perfectly for an Arduino board) ?

Thank you very much for your patience.

I have selected Arduino NG/Atmega8, because the barebone Atmega8 does not work. But I do not know anything about fuses, and I always avoided to play with them, afraid I could harm the uC. I will read about them, because I think it is more to uCs than what I use them for.

Succeeded! Just followed the Arduino tutorial. It looks like a cat was on my desk and played with the wires (on the breadboard, I mean), but it works.

I made a terrible beginner (which I am) mistake the first time I tried: I relied on the power supply from the avrisp programmer and it simply was not enough power for both the backlight and the logic of the LCD. Now I used external power after upload (and after disconnecting the programmer) and it works just fine.

Just one thing: millis() for Atmega8 and Attiny13 is, in fact, ten times more, hundredths of second.

Thank you!

As for the code, i used the LCD example in the Arduio IDE, which worked fine with Arduino before.

The Atmega8 works ok, both digitally and analog (the ADCs I mean). I will retry the connections, maybe I missed something. What (Arduino) pins configurations do you recommend, 7...12 or others? Does it matter?

Half of problem solved: I purchased my Atmega8 and it did not work with the boards file I posted earlier, so I had to set the board to Arduino NG/Atmega8 and upload the sketch by Upload by programmer option. It looks fine and it is a lot cheaper an Atmega168 that I initially purchased. i'll keep you posted.