Hello World,
I guess I am late to the show...just bought my first Arduino a couple weeks ago. It is an UNO R2.
I downloaded the latest Arduino IDE, which says 1.0.5.
I am here desperately seeking a little help.
Must admit to being nothing but frustrated, can not believe how many hours spent on this thing, not one process that I have followed step by step per forums advice, Arduino website, common intuition, etc. has worked the first time around. This includes installing the IDE, burning bootloader onto new atmega328 chips, building Arduino on a breadboard, etc.
But so far at least a few things I have attempted were finally resolved one way or another.
Except this:
So I would like to build a standalone Arduino on a breadboard, and then eventually a pcb. I can immediately think of several different projects that I would like to use this on. But I have precisely followed the instructions here: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone
and remain unable to download sketches....here are the things I have done:
First, I am using a Windows7 64bit pc.
I bought the UNO R2 with Atmega328p-pu. Once I finally got the Arduino IDE installed and working, I was easily able to burn the blink sketch as well as others.
I bought two new Atmega328p-pu and one newAtmega328-pu (all without bootloader) in order to hopefully experiment and learn more about the bootloader deal. What a mistake.
Somehow however, after many unsuccessful attempts at burning the bootloader from instructions here: oddWires: Burning a bootloader into a bare ATmega328
and here: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard
and here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Burning-the-Bootloader-on-ATMega328-using-Arduino-/
and several other places as well, I finally seem to be able to upload sketches onto any of these chips when installed onto the UNO R2. I hazily recall some things involving modifying boards.txt and avrdude files. Dont ask me which methods worked on what chips, all I see is blurrr.
So next I built the breadboard circuit here: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard ......the one at the very bottom right.
and relocated, one at a time after testing on the UNO R2, each of the atmegas from the UNO R2 to the breadboard. I also added the 16mhz crystal and caps. And a resistor and led to pin 19 for testing the blink sketch.
I was, and still am able to download sketches to any of the atmegas when configured this way on the breadboard. But I am still tied to the UNO R2.
So then I bought this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261245245140?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649
which I understand to be a FTDI FT232RL USB to serial gadget so that I can communicate to my new standalone Arduino clone from my pc.
... and thinking this would finalize my breadboard circuit and that I could build a pcb to basically have a clone of my UNO R2.
I have wired it to my breadboard as follows: usbgadget pin TX to atmega pin 2; usbgadget pin RX to atmega pin 3; usbgadget VCC to +5v rail; usbgadget GND to ground rail
and have tried all sorts of twisted things including: swapping out 3 different usb cables; swapping TX and RX connections; jumping DTR to atmega pin 1, with and without a .1uf cap between; 1k pullup resistors between +5 and RX and TX; pushing reset at all different times during the upload sketch process, etc, with each and every different combination of the various earlier mentioned twisted solutions applied that I could think of.
But , of course, once again no joy here, I cannot get any sketches to download to the atmega's and have tried a million and one things....all resulting in the dreaded common avrdude: stk500_getsync() : not in sync: resp=0x00
When I do hit the upload sketch , there are some brief flashes from the TX and RX leds on the usbgadget( too fast to tell which ones exactly) and the trusty atmega pin 19 led blinks rapidly maybe 3 to 9 times, depending on how much more blurry my vision has become.
The device manager on the pc lists USB serial port(COM 5) when I plug in the usbgadget and further shows something about it working correctly with the most current FTDI drivers.
meanwhile, whatever atmega is on the breadboard continues to blink away, convincing me that most likely the connections are all good.
I guess that is about as much as I can think of right now. I sure will appreciate anyone helping nudge me towards a solution, I know it is alot to ask after reading this thesis 
I have written, but it was not fun for me either.....I think I have included about as much relevant information as could be asked for, and I sure hope I have not wasted yet more time here.
Cheers,
Bill
