troubleshooting AVR programmer / dev. board

Development Boards MicroMod
1

Hi, Im playing a bit with electronics and hit the wall just at the start.

I bought those 2

AVR-ISP500 USB programmer

Olimex AVR-P40-USB prototyping board

Both are detected in Linux and seem OK. However when I try to flash the AVR with avrdude this is what I get:

  1. my computer shuts down

  2. or I get an error in the kernel log saying something about current out of limits

  3. once I saw smoke. I dont know if from the AVR, the board or the programmer

Also before this programmer I bought the wrong programmer (6 pins), so also tried building this:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=8508

but my soldering skills suck; the separation between pins is so small I may had done sthg wrong. When I tried it in the board it didnt work but nothing special happened… maybe i broke the board that way?

Can anyone help?

2

the smoke come from the board. it has a burnt spot part on the back. Defective board? Does the warranty cover this?

3

I can’t speak for Sparkfun about the warranty - I don’t work for them.

For the problem under linux, we would need more information about what happened. What was in the kernel log at the time the machine shut down? Those error messages would say a lot about what/why the machine shut down. Usually, the log is in /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog. Also, information about which linux distribution your using would be helpful.

ps - Please don’t blindly post the entire contents of the system log (something I see online quite often). We only need the lines surrounding the shutdown of the machine.