Better avrdude management

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Bugs & Suggestions
1

Hi, we are developing new AVR based boards to control our robots (robotgroup.com.ar - This website is for sale! - robotgroup Resources and Information.) and have the following issues regarding the Arduino IDE when programming:

  1. We have a generic programmable AVRbased USB module based on the usbasp project (USBasp - USB programmer for Atmel AVR controllers - fischl.de). When we compile with the Arduino IDE, and call the avrdude from the command line it works fine. But when we use the "upload" button, it does not work. The error is about verfification, but we know it's uploading bad (and tha's why verification fails). We know the avrdude supplied with the Arduino IDe does not work properly with the USBasp, so we replaced it with the v5.6 from the WinAVR-20090313, and then modified the \etc\avrdude.conf file, to include our processor (ATMega1284p). We think the environment is passing some erroneous parammeter to the avrdude. More: We set the verbose=true in boards.txt, but can't see much output (the dude is much more verbose than is showed in the IDE even with verbose=true).

  2. Another option we tested was to program our small USB hardware with the AVRDoper firmware (http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/avrdoper.html) in CDC mode. We use it with avrdude and with the AVRStudio and it works great. But with the IDE, it only runs the first time we plug the USB, then it fails systematically, telling us the following error:

avrdude: stk500_2_ReceiveMessage(): timeout

  1. Other point: If we use a laptop without serial ports, and without virtual serial ports, nothing works when pressing the upload button. This is not good, takint in account that some open source avr programmers, like the USBasp do not use a serial port. You just call them from avrdude with a line like this:

avrdude -c usbasp -p atmega644p -u -U flash:w:MyFile.hex

The same for the avrdoper, which uses an special "-P param":
avrdude -c stk500v2 -P avrdoper -p atmega644p -u -U flash:w:MyFile.hex

SUGGESTIONS:

  1. Let the user configure some advanced mode to call avrdude (may be in boards.txt). Something like:
    MyBoard.avrdudeparams=-c usbasp -p $DEVICE -u -U flash:w:$FILE

where $DEVICE and $FILE are new IDE vars which let the user not to "wire" those params. Another usefull variable will be $COMPORT, so if the hardware use a commport, the user can configure it in the boards.txt, but if not, he simply does not mention this var (like in the avrdude calling command line above).

  1. Inprove the verbose data. We really would like to see which is exactly the command line the IDE is using to call avrdude. We think logging this to a file, or showing with an advances verbose flag will help people working with other hardware to use it with the excellent Arduino IDE.

  2. Do not impose the need of open a serial port to the IDE, just let the user free to do not use any serial port. This will really help to work with laptops, netbooks, etc. with the mentioned open source hardware.

  3. It would be wonderfull if you put an option to disable autodetect serial ports at start-up. In some machines, the IDE really goes slow and unusable. More: If you have hi port numbers for BT or virtual USBs ti may fail too. Just let the advanced user to disable this. It may be very helpul too, to include in the case the autodetect is disabled, a small new menu entry to trigger the Autodetection. It coud be "Find serial ports" or the like.

Many thanks!
Regards,
Julián