Burning an Arduino Bootloader

Being able to burn an Arduino bootloader to a new ATmega chip is useful for projects originating on Arduino and transferred to a more permanent home on a circuit-board. If their software is to be changed again, it is very handy to be able to reprogram them from the Arduino IDE.

This is primarily based on information found here and here. (The latter is an excellent resource for discovering what the various fuse bits' configuration values mean.)

Wire up the chip as described in In-System-Programming below. Then read the fuses and lock bits (in order to see what actually needs to be changed):

$ avrdude -q -q -p m168 -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -c avrisp -U hfuse:r:-:h -U lfuse:r:-:h -U efuse:r:-:h -U lock:r:-:h
0xdf
0x62
0x1
0x3f

This tells us that the chip has the following fuse-bits set (for more on the meaning of these settings, see here):

• SPIEN serial programming and data-downloading
• CKDIV8, SUT0, CKSEL3, CKSEL2, CKSEL0: internal oscillator at 8MHz (and other defaults)
• The bootloader is already unlocked: 0x3f

If the bootloader is locked, it must first be unlocked:

$ avrdude -p m168 -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -c avrisp -U -e lock:w:0x3f:m

(Note that this also erases the chip -e.)

The main change we're going to make is to configure the chip to use an external oscillator of higher frequency than 8MHz:

$ avrdude -p m168 -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -c avrisp -U lfuse:w:0xff:m -U hfuse:w:0xdd:m

Next, write the bootloader:

$ avrdude -p m168 -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -c avrisp -U flash:w:ADABoot_168.hex

Finally lock the bootloader, to avoid it being accidentally overwritten:

$ avrdude -p m168 -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -c avrisp -U lock:w:0x0f:m