Bootloader hosed? Serial.println() still works....

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Troubleshooting
1

Hi All,

Noob here. I've had a happy little stepper motor sketch running for days using the Adafruit Motor Shield.

I went to start a new project and just tried to upload the Blink sketch to make sure I had connectivity.

It fails and I get the following error:

avrdude: verification error, first mismatch at byte 0x0002
         0x5b != 0x37
avrdude: verification error; content mismatch

The Sketch I had loaded before still runs fine including the Serial.println() in the Serial Monitor.

I'm guessing that I've hosed the bootloader but one question, is it normal for the Serial connection to still operate if the Bootloader is hosed?

Another tid-bit, if I load the exact same sketch that had been running, no errors. Any minor change, error-ville.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks for any advice. Was having so much fun and now I'm dead in the water until I fix this.

Tom

Duemilanove - ATMEGA328
WinXP

2

I think your guess about having a hosed bootloader is the most likely cause. Why and how did it get hosed, who knows.

It's a good excuse to get a USBtinyISB programmer kit from Adafruit. It will burn a fresh copy of the bootloader from the Arduino IDE and if your running windows there is now a GUI wrapper for AVRDUDE avalible so you don't have to learn all the command line options and variables to utilize AVRDUDE. This would also allow you to burn in a sketch without having a bootloader resident in memory so you can reclaim that extra memory space for your application.

See, every cloud has a silver lining :wink:

Lefty