Help with UNO and avrdude

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Greetings all,

I am very new to Arduino, and after working with my UNO for about a week, an issue has sprung up. The problem itself is not a new topic around here, but I can't seem to resolve it using method described in other forum posts.

It began with a new error message in windoze XP upon start up. "Windows - No Disk --Exception Processing Message c0000013 Parameters 75b6bf7c". This message will eventually clear, but it requires about 30 clicks of the "ignore" button. At the same time, a new message appeared in Arduino 1.0 after attempting to upload. "avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00".

After reading about each issue individually, it seems that a USB "drive" was improperly disconnected from my PC. I have seen pages dedicated to this windoze error, but most seem to suggest adjusting the registry to (basically) tell the OS NOT to give the error message. This will make booting in windows less frustrating, but will not fix the actual issue. Com3 (the port my arduino board resides on) is unable to be located by Arduino 1.0.

Attempts were made to uninstall the board, and to reinstall it. No dice. As a last resort, I restored to an earlier point (prior to the arduino being installed in the first place). Same issue.

I utilize a dual boot with WinXP and Fedora Linux (16). I gave up on trying to cure the windows issue and tried to use Fedora for programming. Unfortunately, I am also very new to Linux, and it seems that arduino was successfully installed in that OS. Trying to locate the correct port, however, is not working. I have one option of serial port, and it isn't the correct one. I have viewed the numerous forums on installing arduino in fedora, but due to my limited knowledge of it, I have not been able to upload.

I have been diligently working on a project, and am very anxious to get it configured correctly. Can anyone suggest an "idiot's guide" for linux setup? Or perhaps an idea of how to cure the windows issue? Getting desperate, and spent the last of my budgeted money on servos. I'm unable to buy a new ATMega328 chip right now, and honestly, I'm not convinced that this would even help anything.

Help!!

Thanks for any advice or pointers that could help get me back to work.

pixelize

2

Curing windows is easy. Reinstallation.

Did you check the getting started guides for linux?

3

Thank you for your reply madworm.

A repair of the win OS using the installation disk has been performed, but has not rectified the problem. A complete reinstall is technically easy, but I would like to avoid this unless there is just no other way. Initially configuring the OS to my specs is very time consuming.

I did read the start-up guide for fedora. The part I'm running into difficulty with the section "RXTX fixup -- Link the proper files". Notably the command "find ~ -name librxtxSerial.so
-o -name RXTXcomm.jar | grep -v Download"

I am trying to learn linux as best I can, but fully understanding how things work will take time and experience. I know some basic terminal commands, but not enough to be literate with them. Specifically, when the "find" command is used, I am returned to the shell prompt (with no information printed). A situation such as mine would be a good stepping stone to learning, but I cannot locate a good reference on the fundamentals.

pixilize

4

Well, there's always "man find".

To move around within a man-page first have a look at "man less" :wink:

  • next page: space bar
  • prev. page: backspace
  • search for stuff: /stuff
  • next occurrence: n
  • prev. occurrence: N
  • exit: q

In case of the find command you've posted something like this would reveal what the "-o" means:

man find

/-o

now pres 'n' a couple of times

expr1 -o expr2
Or: expr2 is not evaluated if expr1 is true.

BTW: the '' is the 'line continuation' character. If you don't get any results for the search try the a simple search without OR and grep filter, that should work.

find / -iname "*rxtx*"

To filter out a filename you don't want, you can add another option:

find / -iname "*rxtx*" ! -iname "*download*"

or filter the end result of what 'find' produces through grep (which also prunes folders with that name):

find / -iname "*rxtx*" | grep -V -i "download"

If you're getting a lot of error messages and / or the results are zipping by, ignore the error messages by send STDERR to /dev/null and use 'less' to page the results.

find / -iname "*rxtx*" 2>/dev/null | less

A very good forum for linux questions is: www.linuxquestions.org :wink:
All sorts of documentation: www.tldp.org