ATMega328P "AVRDude: Could not find USBTiny Device (0x1781/0xc9f)"

arduino atmega avrdude
user3185748 picture user3185748 · Jun 16, 2015 · Viewed 28.5k times · Source

Good afternoon,

I recently assembled an ATMega328P based micro-controller PCB of my own design. I feel good about the circuit itself as I managed to upload the Arduino Blink sketch via the Sparkfun AVR Pocket Programmer.

After uploading this sketch I noted that the ATMega was using its internal oscillator. I didn't feel comfortable changing fuse bits I attempted to install the Arduino boot loader again through the Arduino IDE.

At this point a number of errors were thrown but the board started to use it's external clock and run the Blink program correctly.

I can no longer however upload any further code to the chip, since I couldn't get AVRDude to work on my Mac, I installed AVRDude 5.1 on my Windows 8.1 PC.

I then connected the device and sent: 

avrdude -c usbtiny -p atmega328p

This simply returned:

avrdude: Error: Could not find USBtiny device ( 0x1781/0xc9f)

Have I inadvertently skewed with the chip's fuse bits? How can I save this chip??

UPDATE: I managed to install AVRDude 6.0.1 and now the error reads:

avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1

Full result is seen here:

Terminal Return

Answer

RickJansen picture RickJansen · Oct 5, 2015

Ran into this error message too, with an AdaFruit 3.3V trinket pro. Note that you need to activate the boot loader FIRST by pressing the reset button. The red LED sort of flashes a bit, only THEN start the upload from the IDE. Else you get the error above.

Don't wait too long either, else you miss the upload window, and you get the error again. The red LED must flash.

I thought I had damaged my board too, but the procedure is described in the documentation. (An Arduino Uno does not need this.)

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