This directory contains the Optiboot small bootloader for AVR microcontrollers, somewhat modified specifically for the Arduino environment. Optiboot is more fully described here: http://code.google.com/p/optiboot/ and is the work of Peter Knight (aka Cathedrow), building on work of Jason P Kyle, Spiff, and Ladyada. Arduino-specific modification are by Bill Westfield (aka WestfW) Arduino-specific issues are tracked as part of the Arduino project at http://code.google.com/p/arduino ------------------------------------------------------------ Building optiboot for Arduino. Production builds of optiboot for Arduino are done on a Mac in "unix mode" using CrossPack-AVR-20100115. CrossPack tracks WINAVR (for windows), which is just a package of avr-gcc and related utilities, so similar builds should work on Windows or Linux systems. One of the Arduino-specific changes is modifications to the makefile to allow building optiboot using only the tools installed as part of the Arduino environment, or the Arduino source development tree. All three build procedures should yield identical binaries (.hex files) (although this may change if compiler versions drift apart between CrossPack and the Arduino IDE.) Building Optiboot in the Arduino IDE Install. Work in the .../hardware/arduino/bootloaders/optiboot/ and use the "omake " command, which just generates a command that uses the arduino-included "make" utility with a command like: make OS=windows ENV=arduino or make OS=macosx ENV=arduino On windows, this assumes you're using the windows command shell. If you're using a cygwin or mingw shell, or have one of those in your path, the build will probably break due to slash vs backslash issues. On a Mac, if you have the developer tools installed, you can use the Apple-supplied version of make. The makefile uses relative paths ("../../../tools/" and such) to find the programs it needs, so you need to work in the existing optiboot directory (or something created at the same "level") for it to work. Building Optiboot in the Arduino Source Development Install. In this case, there is no special shell script, and you're assumed to have "make" installed somewhere in your path. Build the Arduino source ("ant build") to unpack the tools into the expected directory. Work in Arduino/hardware/arduino/bootloaders/optiboot and use make OS=windows ENV=arduinodev or make OS=macosx ENV=arduinodev Programming Chips Using the _isp Targets The CPU targets have corresponding ISP targets that will actuall program the bootloader into a chip. "atmega328_isp" for the atmega328, for example. These will set the fuses and lock bits as appropriate as well as uploading the bootloader code. The makefiles default to using a USB programmer, but you can use a serial programmer like ArduinoISP by changing the appropriate variables when you invoke make: make ISPTOOL=stk500v1 ISPPORT=/dev/tty.usbserial-A20e1eAN \ ISPSPEED=-b19200 atmega328_isp The "atmega8_isp" target does not currently work, because the mega8 doesn't have the "extended" fuse that the generic ISP target wants to pass on to avrdude. You'll need to run avrdude manually. Standard Targets I've reduced the pre-built and source-version-controlled targets (.hex and .lst files included in the git repository) to just the three basic 16MHz targets: atmega8, atmega16, atmega328.