seeking guidance/advice using AVR Dragon

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Development
1

I'm looking for guidance / advice / wisdom from all folks out there that have experience using AVR Dragon from Atmel.

I just got mine yesterday and I've played around with it all day today but I fear I've managed to brick several ATmega chips with it. It seems almost too easy to be able to make a chip unusable!

So if you have any input or even if you could direct me to some helpful websites with valuable information / instruction / tutorials dealing with the AVR Dragon I would be extremely grateful.

Some general questions for those with experience...

  1. How realistic is it that I've bricked a few chips with the ISP interface of the AVR Dragon even though I didn't necessarily start a write process?

  2. Can seemingly "bricked" chips be saved via PP/HVSP programming? If so, how?

  3. Why do pre-burned-bootloader chips from SparkFun not read properly and cause problems when I try to simply "Read Signature" on them in my AVR Dragon? It seems to give me the same response as the chips I fear I've bricked already! "Entering programming mode... FAILED"

Again, any tidbit of knowledge you can offer is very valuable here!

Thanks for your help!

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  1. i don't know, maybe a bad hookup e.g. Reverse power and ground.
    Also, the avr-studio interface is not that intuitive. It may be possible to kill a chip without realizing it- i've done it.
  2. depends, fuses can be reset but if the chip is fried...
  3. the prepared chips need an external oscillator(crystal)
3

This comes late in the year i realize. Hopefully you have solved the problem by now, but just in case.

The Dragon doesn't supply operating voltage to the target chip unless you insert a jumper to do that. The target board must have its own VCC. Or you must provide it by jumpering between pins 2,4, or 6 of the VCC header to either pin 2 of the ISP header or pin 4 of the Jtag header.

If you have a socket installed on your Dragon for programming the Mega 48 to Mega 328 it still doesn't have VCC or Ground supplied directly. One must interface these by jumpers to the 40 pin header (after inserting the header). And one will have to jumper the ISP or Jtag as well.

rep