Please help, I can't communicate with my ATmega328p via Arduino as ISP

Hi, I have been trying to get this working for a while now...

For a project I am working on, I want to use a standalone ATmega328p(internal 8 MHz clock). The first thing I did was to upload the Arduino bootloader onto it, that didn't work, it said that it had the wrong signature, so I played arround with adding a board for the standalone Arduino, I even downgraded to IDE version 1.0.1 for that, with no luck. Now I am using WinAvr to upload a test blink sketch, that should work. After various tests and ArduinoISP sketches on my UNO, I was getting a small succes, that wasn't the not in sync error and wasn't the Yikes! BS, unfortunately the pin 7 on my UNO was now blinking :angry: the makefile was downloaded from instructables and modified accordingly. Verbose output is telling my that the oscillator is off and Aref aswell as Vref are 0V. And the Fusebits are all 0 although I already set them via command line. I'm attaching verbose output of the -n test.

PS I am connecting the ATmega to my uno by hooking the UNOs ICSP header up to the Chip, I tried cap on UNO for reset aswell as pullup for the ATmega

I hope someone has an idea, thank you :slight_smile:

verbos.txt (2.79 KB)

I see a couple of things about your post that I wonder about, so need quite a bit more information. You mention you uploaded "the Arduino bootloader." There is no such thing as "the Arduino bootloader," there are many different bootloaders depending on the board selected in the boards menu when you do the Burn Bootloader function of the IDE. So I'm not sure which one you are trying to use. Some of them (or most of them) require a crystal. I'm not sure if you've added custom boards.txt entries or standalone boards manager files, so don't really know what you're working with. Also, it would be useful to see your wiring, because perhaps you have something wrong with the way you have it wired. Perhaps show us a hand-drawn schematic of how you have it wired. If your wiring is neat and can be followed in a photo, that could be useful to see. What version of the IDE are you using?

You may be interested to know a trick for using the internal oscillator on the ATmega328P, Nick Gammon has a board programmer here:

and you communicate with it via the Serial Monitor while it runs standalone on your Uno. In his board programmer sketch you select Lilypad, it will upload the ATmegaBOOT_168_atmega328_pro_8MHz bootloader with fuses set for internal oscillator at 8MHz. This may be the most popular way to use a stand alone chip with internal oscillator.

I can give you a schematic tomorrow, and I will also Look At that post, as far as the bootloader goes I Had a costum board selected that I added into boards.txt, the file will also follow tomorrow, but thank you for your fast reply :slight_smile:

Edit: I also tried and failed at using the optiboot bootloader for internal 8MHz

I don't think I need to send anything, just a thousand hugs :smiley: I don't know why I didnt come across that post, but it worked! Thank you, you are what I understand of a good and supportive community member :slight_smile: