I have an ArduinoNG board with an Atmega8 and a Boarduino with an Atmega168. I bought a new [Atmega168 with Arduino Bootloader, but it doesn’t seem to be working right.
The board is unresponsive to programming and the LED on the board continuously runs in a repeating cycle that is about a second long where it pulses faster and faster until it it appears to be on constantly.
I resolved this a while back, but in case someone else has the same problem, here’s the deal:
The Atmega168 I received has a fast bootloader installed. You only have about 1 second to initiate an upload before it starts executing the previously loaded software.
If you are trying to reprogram it with the Arduino SDK, you’ll need to hold down the reset button on your board, initiate the upload process, count to 2, and then release the Arduino reset button.
Partly this is also because you don’t have a board with auto-reset.
Because the auto-reset solves the problem of timing the start of the upload with the bootloader “window”, that bootloader reduced the size of the window to get sketching starting faster.
