Joining the Arduino collective

Keeping tabs on the ‘maker’ community, Arduino as a development platform is certainly very popular.

I initially dismissed it when I first started learning about microcontrollers as I was learning on the Atmel ATmega8, which the Arduinos of the time were based around, and figured that I wanted to learn at a ‘pure’ level and not be confused by an additional abstraction layer.

Now I am in a position where I feel that I can code in C directly for an ATmega MPU but that overall the coding process wears me down with syntax, compatibility issues and testing. Now I actually want some simplification to the process! It’s funny how we come full-circle.

Arduino is also more mature now as a platform – there are many hardware options to suit different designing requirements. Sparkfun’s Arduino Pro series appealed to me and got me thinking that maybe I could switch (or rather, upgrade) to an Arduino-based environment for my RetroTAC project. Since the hardware is ATmega and the coding is similar to C, it’s not a big leap or a start-from-scratch kinda thing – more of an evolution.

So last week I bought an Arduino Pro 3.3v/8MHz unit from Sparkfun and on the weekend I set about getting it going.

I soldered male headers to the port pins (later realising that Arduinos normally have female headers, but oh well!) and jumpered up my USB-to-TTL serial adapter to the programming port pins. For power I will be running the RetroTAC from a 3.7v Li-Ion battery so I soldered jumper wires to the empty shell of a StarTAC where the flat power jack comes out, and hooked it right into the BATT of the Arduino.

At first the Arduino software gave me an error:
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51

Which I found was more than likely related to the programmer being unable to reset the Arduino hardware before attempting to upload my sketch.

There’s a break in the trace (intentionally, but who’s intention and for what purpose I don’t know) which doesn’t link the RST pin on the PROGRAM header. I wired the USB adapter’s reset line to RESET on the Arduino and had the Blink ‘Hello World’ sketch running within minutes.