Atmega328 bricked?

Hi,

I have a customised PCB that uses an Atmega328 IC (the same as the Arduino Pro Mini).

I believe I bricked (I think that is the word) some of the chips I have. I think this happened when trying to burn the Optiboot bootloader to allow for a watch dog timer on these.

I continuously get this message on the 'bad' PCB when using the Atmel AVRISP mkii:

avrdude: stk500v2_command(): command failed
avrdude: stk500v2_program_enable(): bad AVRISPmkII connection status: Unknown status 0x00
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
this check.

On the 'good' PCB, bootloading/uploading is fine.

If this is the problem, from Nick Gammon's blogs, it appears that a high voltage parallel programmer is required such as the AVR Dragon to fix them. Should i get one of these or is there other things i can try first?

Thanks

Describe what you did, and what happened.

Jeffro_Aus:
If this is the problem, from Nick Gammon's blogs, it appears that a high voltage parallel programmer is required such as the AVR Dragon to fix them. Should i get one of these or is there other things i can try first?

Thanks

check out how to make a high voltage programmer.

Nick Gammon just did up a webpage on High Voltage programming, check it out:

To be honest, I am not exactly sure how I did this, although I can pin point 2 methods I believe are the likely causes:

  1. Bootloading using the atmel avrisp mk2 (which was successful), then trying to use the Sparkfun FTDI board- red light flashed twice only.
  2. Attempting to bootload using the atmel avrisp mk2 using Optiboot bootloader.

From Nick Gammon's webpage on high voltage programming, Gammon Forum : Electronics : Microprocessors : High-voltage programming for AVR chips, there doesn't appear to be an easy solution for this atmega328 (same as Pro Mini) without getting a new chip considering all the pins are used on the PCB and cannot be accessed easily.

Unless there is a better way?

Thanks