Arduino as ISP Programmer Problems

While looking online I found a link for the MintDuino to the Make site. I decided to try building one myself but got to the point of programming it and, doh!, realized that the chip had to have a bootloader on it. There had been a couple of times before where I had used another Arduino to reprogram a bootloader onto a malfunctioning Freeduino board and the page showing it (http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoISP) worked well.

This time it did not and here was the error message:
avrdude: stk500_paged_write(): (a) protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x11
avrdude: stk500_cmd(): programmer is out of sync

I thought I would be careful and upload the sketch to the programmer board and then connect the target board and then reconnect the USB (that had been removed before connecting the wires as shown on the link) cable and then run the programmer as an ISP.

I searched on the forum and found a thread for which a few fixes were suggested such as placing a 120 ohm resistor between the programming board's reset and gnd and an alternative of placing a 10 uF cap between 5 V and gnd. Neither worked for me. I kept reading and came across this post:


Re: Arduino ISP Bootload Not Working
« Reply #16 on: December 29, 2011, 06:49:07 PM »
Bigger Bigger Smaller Smaller Reset Reset Reply with quoteQuote
The original version of the second ISP sketch worked! You can find it here: http://mega-isp.googlecode.com/files/ArduinoISP.04.zip

Thank you so much Coding Badly and everyone who helped out! This is why I love arduino!

Informational Solidarity,

Will


This time when I tried the sketch I had the target board connected as I uploaded the new bootloader from the post above to the programmer and then ran the Arduino as ISP. It finally worked! And the MintDuino works with the new ATmega168 with bootloader!