Hey all. I'm an Arduino newbie and just built a Diavolino to give myself another board to play with. I configured it to get power from the USB connection by installing the appropriate jumper. I didn't include the jumper to bypass the voltage regulator because by my reading of the schematics, it's unnecessary. (Right?) I also didn't install the LED, as I would like to run the LOL shield from it at some point.

Soooo. When I had figured out how to get the FTDI Friend recognized by my Mac, I got the dreaded "programmer is not responding" error. I see here that this may be caused by the Diavolino not resetting, and spent some time trying to hit the reset button at the appropriate moment. (As I understand it, anywhere up to 6 seconds before the serial input begins, yes?) I failed to transfer my sketches in all cases with the same error.

I've seen two possibilities that I've not eliminated to this point: first, clean off the flux, and second, check all my soldering. The soldering looks good, but I wonder if I could have overheated the board during soldering. I didn't linger over any joint, but I'm not clear on how much abuse the ATmega can take.

Any advice is appreciated, thanks.

Mike

Hi Mike,
First off, the AVR microcontroller is *tough as nails.* If something has gone wrong, that's almost certainly not it.

> I didn't include the jumper to bypass the voltage regulator because by my reading of the schematics, it's unnecessary. (Right?)

Yes, that is correct.


>I also didn't install the LED, as I would like to run the LOL shield from it at some point.

I would suggest *temporarily* placing the LED in place, just holding it there, to see if the chip is up and running. *IF* it still has the original program, the LED should blink.


>When I had figured out how to get the FTDI Friend recognized by my Mac

Are you sure that you've selected it in the Arduino menu, and also that you have the right board type selected?

Also, double check that you have the *correct* caps installed by the crystal, and that the other caps are installed (and soldered) correctly as well. Double-check chip orientation, too.

The problem was that I hadn't set the board type to the Duemilanove. Dumb.

Thanks for the help!

Mike