Problem with uploading bootloader to DX Arduino Nano

Using Arduino Microcontrollers
1

Hi

For my project I needed some cheap clones of Nano and I bought them from DealExtreme.
Four came, all without bootloader. I needed to program them with ArduinoISP. Three of them already works, fourth give me this error during bootloader upload:

avrdude: verifying ...
avrdude: verification error, first mismatch at byte 0x0000
         0x3f != 0x00
avrdude: verification error; content mismatch
avrdude: Send: Q [51]   [20] 
avrdude: Recv: . [14] 
avrdude: Recv: . [10] 

avrdude done.  Thank you.

Whole error code here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/619007/nano.txt.

Anyone have ideas how to solve this?

2

avrdude: Device signature = 0x000000
avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature.
avrdude: Expected signature for ATMEGA328P is 1E 95 0F

My guess would be a bad connection. Try re-wiring.

3

Connection is 100% proper as I've programmed all 3 other nano's with it.
Shall I try ICSP connectors?

4

Tried ICSP - I don't know if I've used proper pinout. Still didn't get any further.

5

Bump - no one have any ideas how to solve this issue?

6

If you're not getting a valid device signature (and 000000 is not at all valid), then you have a pretty significant problem. Since the same setup is working on other Nanos, perhaps that particular board is simply broken.

ArduinoISP is poor on error checking. In particular, the "avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions" doesn't mean anything, since ArduinoISP doesn't check the returned data from the "enter programming mode" instruction. The chip/board could be completely dead. (You'd probably get the same sequence with nothing connected...)

What sort of test equipment do you have to poke at things with?

Avoid using -F in avrdude. It's only purpose is to override conditions that you should be investigating and fixing, rather than overriding, and it can push error detection even further form the original error.

7

I have nothing really (speaking of programmers and hardware), but I thought there's some way to get things going with Arduino.

I wrote to DX, they did refund this one particular nano, but still I'd like to get it working somehow. If not, I'll use it as a voltage-regulator for my other projects...