Is my Atmega328P bad?

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

I recently built a standalone Arduino Uno that uses the FT232RL for USB to UART and works on 5V at 16MHz. After all the chips were soldered, I tried burning the Arduino bootloader through the IDE using the AVR Pocket Programmer and I get errors, specifically the one listed below. Does this mean the chip is bad? I've checked all the connections and they are correct. I've also looked through other posts on the forum that suggest using the -B switch through the command line but that didn't help.

avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
         Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
         this check.

avrdude done.  Thank you.

When I do try the -F switch I get this:

avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions
avrdude: Device signature = 0x000000
avrdude: Yikes!  Invalid device signature.
avrdude: Expected signature for ATMEGA328P is 1E 95 0F
2

There was someone else having a similar issue with the AVR Pocket Programmer here: AVR pocket programmer vs Arduino UNO ICSP - Microcontrollers - Arduino Forum. Usually I'd expect the issue to be wiring related but that post indicates there may be something else going on with that specific programmer.

My advice is to buy a cheap 6 pin USBasp from eBay. They work great and you could buy 9 of them for the price of that Sparkfun programmer. The only minor issue I've encountered with the USBasp was fixed by PeterVH's modified firmware but the stock firmware works fine.

3

Thanks. This is going to seem really silly but I investigated a little further and it turns out I had just tacked on the ISP header but not really soldered it to the board. Man this is embarrassing! It works great now. I will give the USBAsp a try. It is quite inexpensive!

4

You can get away without soldering on the ISP header, if you hold it right - put it into the thing you're connecting to, poke it through the holes, then push the top of the connector sideways so it's going in at an angle, and the pins are held against the metal. Works pretty well, though of course you occasionally have to adjust your grip or something.