A Sad AVR Story with a Happy Ending

May 11th, 2008 in Electronics

Some time ago I was playing with an AVR ATTiny2313 MCU. It all went like this… I connected my AVR Dragon programmer, opened AVR studio and mounted the IC on the ZIF socket. Then I created a new project, and went to configure the device’s fuses. I started to uncheck and check the options that I wanted but after changing to another tab to see other configuration options, I started to receive an error related to ISP (serial programming). After I while, I realized that I set the fuses incorrectly. I asked my self… how could that happen? Well, no one could be possibly blamed for that but me! I wanted to recover that little ATTiny, specially because that was my last piece of AVR MCUs (in contrast with PICs, I have a lot of them). So the only way to save it was to use Parallel Programming and reset the fuses. That requiered a lot of time and wiring because I didn’t have a circuit and cable to perform that… but I was willing to do it no matter what… So I just did it! Checked my wiring and all connections then connected everything and kept my fingers crossed… it worked! yoohoo! I was able to recover that poor little thing