Can I convert this to Arduino IDE

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
14

SouthernAtHeart:
THANK YOU, AGAIN. I think I've about got it in my head now!
I'm just a tinkerer, so using the UNO as the ICSP is fine for me.

Yes it should be fine especially if just occasional. I really should try it myself some day :blush:

So just to be certain I've got it, the simple steps are:

  1. load the ISP Sketch on the UNO.
  2. connect the UNO to the Sparkfun board via the ICSP headers (properly, from that webpage)
  3. write my new firmware sketch for the Sparkfun board.
  4. change the setting to Tools/Programmer/Arduino as ISP
    ...and compile/load!
    That's it?

Sounds right. Understand that you will be overwriting the firmware that comes on that Sparkfun board, so your sketch will need to provide some replacement functionality if you intend to control the motors.

I'm not familiar with that Sparkfun board, have never touched one, but I did download the firmware just to have a quick look. It is not meant to be compiled with the Arduino IDE, probably WinAVR would work. They did not include the hex file in the zip I downloaded. So you may be burning a bit of a bridge the first time you reprogram the Sparkfun board. Their source code would need to be recompiled to create a hex file. Just so you're aware. The other thing that could be done, is before programming the board, read the flash with AVRDUDE into a hex file on your computer. Then it can be re-uploaded to the board if you want.