Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Burned out Arduino recovered

This doesn't have anything to do with the RaPiArbot, but a few weeks ago, I was asked to look into putting FORTH on an Arduino Uno.  It was for a project at work.

I was able to get a working implementation of 328eForth on it by using one Arduino to program another. (www.offete.com has been reorganized, so I'm not sure where to get the 328eForth image any more.  I think you can e-mail them.)

I had tried using a USBtinyISP AVR Programmer to write the Arduino, but in the end it turned out to be easier just to hook up one Arduino as a programmer for another Arduino.

In order to make sure it was working safely, I also reprogrammed the bootloader of the Arduino with Forth back to the original Arduino bootloader.  I wanted to be able to recover my own Arduino after I was done playing with Forth, and I was successful at restoring the Arduino.

Then, on a whim, I tried restoring the bootloader on the Arduino that had been burned out, and it ended up working again.

So... nice.