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Now I'll show you how to repair an arduino board and how to upload a bootloader - how
to burn bootloader into arduino chips. This board got dammaged about six months ago, but
back then I had another board, so I didn't really care much and well I didn't want to
order a new Atmega328 chip, because.. uhmm.. well it wasn't needed back then. But now I
want to give the board to my friend so I decided to repair it. Not every arduino board can
be repaired - you need one that has a socket so you can replace the chip. You also have
to make sure that the part that's broken is the chip itself. As you can see now it's connected
to the USB port and you can see that the power LED is on. Also when I plug it in I can see
that the my PC recognizes the board as a serial port. When I try to upload sketches I can
see that the RX LED flashes (obviously my mistake LED not a PIN), but the tx LED doesn't.
So the FTDI chip, the one that's responsible for converting USB to UART communication (serial)
works but for some reason the chip doesn't respond. Well it doesn't respond because I
damaged it. You can buy a new one and now quite a lot of suppliers sell chips that already
come with a bootloader. This one (the ATmega chip I got) didn't come with a bootloader
burned into it. I burned it myself into the chip and you can see that the blink example
(sketch) works, but in case you get a chip that doesn't come with a bootloader you can
burn it yourself into it with another arduino board and now I am going to show you how to
do it. To do so you need either a standalone programmer (additional option - not shown here) or you can use another arduino
board. You have to connect several pins, I'll show you a schematic because I know it will
be easier to understand that way (Note that there is a 10uF capacitor between ground and
reset pin on the board used as the programmer - forgot to mention that). Ok now it's ready.
In order to use an arduino board as a programmer you have to upload (into it) a sketch called
'arduinoISP' and I've already done it. Now once it's done you have to connect the board
then change the board type in IDE to the correct one (so if you're burning a bootloader into
an arduino duemilanove you have to select it - you need a bootloader for that particular
board not the programmer) and the click 'burn a bootloader - and I'll do it now. I now selected
the option and now you can see that the bootloader is currently being burned into the chip. Make sure
you use the newest arduino IDE you can find, because some older versions had some problems
with it (burning bootloaders) and you could get error messages. It's done. Now when I
plug it in you can now see that the blink example (sketch) is running on the board.
When you burn the bootloader you also get the blink sketch as a default sketch.It was
the same when you boaught your arduino board it came with the blink sketch already uploaded.
The board is now repaired. That's all. ()