Hey there,

I have been using avrdude 5.9 with the SparkFun Pocket AVR Programmer on a Macbook Pro. Using the latest avrdude everything was working great. I have been writing in xcode and wanted to make use of the Arduino Wire and HardwareSerial code. I really cannot say what went wrong with absolute certainty but I did try to burn a bootloader out of Arduino IDE and it may have messed up a few things.

I get the dreaded "avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1" that is usually solved by ensuring power and cabling is correct. In this case none of those things have helped and I am at my wit's end. Here is the output I get when querying the board:

ken-rogers-macbook-pro-17:build kenrogers$ avrdude -c usbtiny -p m328p -v
avrdude: Version 5.9, compiled on Feb 28 2010 at 18:32:03
Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Brian Dean, http://www.bdmicro.com/
Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Joerg Wunsch

System wide configuration file is "/usr/local/etc/avrdude.conf"
User configuration file is "/Users/kenrogers/.avrduderc"
User configuration file does not exist or is not a regular file, skipping

Using Port : unknown
Using Programmer : usbtiny
AVR Part : ATMEGA328P
Chip Erase delay : 9000 us
PAGEL : PD7
BS2 : PC2
RESET disposition : dedicated
RETRY pulse : SCK
serial program mode : yes
parallel program mode : yes
Timeout : 200
StabDelay : 100
CmdexeDelay : 25
SyncLoops : 32
ByteDelay : 0
PollIndex : 3
PollValue : 0x53
Memory Detail :

Block Poll Page Polled
Memory Type Mode Delay Size Indx Paged Size Size #Pages MinW MaxW ReadBack
----------- ---- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ------ ----- ----- ---------
eeprom 65 5 4 0 no 1024 4 0 3600 3600 0xff 0xff
flash 65 6 128 0 yes 32768 128 256 4500 4500 0xff 0xff
lfuse 0 0 0 0 no 1 0 0 4500 4500 0x00 0x00
hfuse 0 0 0 0 no 1 0 0 4500 4500 0x00 0x00
efuse 0 0 0 0 no 1 0 0 4500 4500 0x00 0x00
lock 0 0 0 0 no 1 0 0 4500 4500 0x00 0x00
calibration 0 0 0 0 no 1 0 0 0 0 0x00 0x00
signature 0 0 0 0 no 3 0 0 0 0 0x00 0x00

Programmer Type : USBtiny
Description : USBtiny simple USB programmer, http://www.ladyada.net/make/usbtinyisp/
avrdude: programmer operation not supported

avrdude: Using SCK period of 10 usec
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.01s

avrdude: Device signature = 0x0f0103
avrdude: Expected signature for ATMEGA328P is 1E 95 0F
Double check chip, or use -F to override this check.

avrdude done. Thank you.


My fuses, lock and signature look to be "empty" but after hours on end reading I am still not sure what to do. I am about to order some new chips at this point.

Any pointers?
Thanks in advance,
Ken

Hmm. I've never used that programmer, nor even heard of it before your post here. I'd suggest that you take this up with Sparkfun directly, since they're the ones that design and manufacture it.

It's product page says "We've gotten a big response [...] from Mac and Linux users having problems. We use this programmer extensively on a Windows box and love it. " So, it's possible that your problem is already discussed (and possibly resolved) in the Sparkfun forums.

Now, the error that you're showing here is a *device signature* error, not the "rc=-1" issue. Sounds like it thinks you've got the wrong chip in there.