I'm facing a problem. This has been discussed a dozens of times on this forum and I've read almost all the threads.
I have a couple of Arduinos and I can burn bootloaders till the resistors burst. From Arduino to Arduino that is.
But I seriously can't get my ATMega 8 working with a custom Bootloader to save my life.
I want to burn a 'file.hex' with my Arduino Uno onto the ATMega 8.
I don't want to come off, as a person who is just to lazy to read through all the threads and try everything, trust me I did.
For example there is this really great tutorial, but it doesn't show how to burn a bootloader thats not selectable in the ArduinoIDE Menu so I can't really work with it. http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard
The ATMega 8 has been sitting around for almost a year and I still havent figured out how to do it. So you can feel my frustration with it.
I have even tried it with AVRdude in the terminal and I couldn't get that to work, I got a lot of errors.
If there is someone who can help me, I'm very thankful.
And if theres something that I REALLY have done wrong, just tell me, I'm willing to learn.
To burn a bootloader to your ATMega8 using your UNO you would be better off reading this http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoISP You will need to be sure the bootloader you wish to burn onto the ATMega8 is suitable for that chip and suitable for the frequency you intend to run the chip at (16Mhz, 8Mhz etc) as I discovered here http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,116404.0.html you will need to add correct settings to the board.txt file for the bootloader your using.
if theres something that I REALLY have done wrong, just tell me
You haven't said what you've actually done, or even how your bootloader is "Custom."
I hardly ever burn bootloaders using the Arduino IDE. I don't trust it, it requires modifications to a bunch of files in odd places, and isn't flexible about where it gets the .hex file from. I use either the *_isp targets in the optiboot Makefile, or start with those (letting them fail) and cut/paste/edit with the shell, so that they contain the proper arguments:
