On Tuesday 13 November 2007, Marge Coahran wrote: > I am using several STK500s with ATmega8515L chips to teach assembly > language in a computer science course. Today two students got the > error (below) from avrdude. As best I can tell, the serial port > connections are correct and solid. Can this error also mean something more > ominous, say that something on the chip or the board just got blown? >
Hello all, I am sorry, but I don't have the right answer to your problem, but similar experiences. We have used STK500+STK501+ATMega128s several years (5 or so) now in a student laboratory. We have had many problems similar to yours with the combination. We have around 100 students yearly, so the use is quite demanding. As of now I think that only two ATMega128s have actually been damaged and it seems that in some processors the A/D converter or USART0 might have been damaged. In some cases I have been able to communicate to the STK500 with AVRStudio, which might report that you have an old firmware version and suggests to upgrade it. I have done so and after that there hasn't been any problems with programming the chip with avrdude. Sometimes swapping STK500s and STK501s has also helped, I don't know why, but it has. Time seems to correct the problem sometimes, so don't through the board or the chip away. Check again after a month or so. The problems seem to be bigger when the humidity is low (in winter time here in Finland) and therefore ESD is more of a problem. We haven't had any ESD protection in the lab, but now we are in the process of improving it. The coming winter will tell if the situation is any better. Julius -- D.Sc. Julius Luukko Laboratory of Control Engineering and Digital Systems Lappeenranta University of Technology, FINLAND phone:+358-5-621 6713, fax:+358-5-621 6799, www: http://www.ee.lut.fi _______________________________________________ AVR-chat mailing list AVR-chat@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-chat
