Good day, everyone.
I am a total and absolute imbecile and I forgot to put a programming port for my printed circuit board before sending it for fabrication. As a result I now have to solder in tiny tiny enamel wires onto the pins of the MCU on the board, to program it. I know, I'm a moron, I'm paying for it dearly.
So the problem is that I'm having issues programming the Atmega2560 MCU with the USBasp. Now I'm more than confident that the programmer works fine, I'm just not sure if the MCU is properly powered/ installed and emits life signals. I have the 16mhz crystal, caps, reset resistors and everything else set up on the board but I have no way of seeing if the MCU is even alive. I just got my first scope a few days ago (Rigol DS1054Z), this is my first exposure to a piece of professional diagnostics equipment and I feel this would be an appropriate time to test the board for life signs. Question is, where do I poke the proddy sticks (so to speak)? What should I be looking for as a sign the the controller is alive and well? One way I can think of is that I can try to use AVR ISP MK2 to try and talk to the MCU.
(as i'm writing this, it dawned on me that I probably didn't even set the fuses on the atmega as it's a fresh off the package unit. oh lord.)
So this would be more of a question of where to probe the scope and what to look for in terms of signs of life, that's really what this thread is about.
The Arduino IDE is saying that it can't set the CLK of the MCU and that I should check if the board is connected. The USBasp briefly blinks when I try to upload the blink sketch but then immediately fails wit the error. There's aways a chance that I've botched up the solder job so hence why I'm asking for advice here.
The error:
Arduino: 1.8.9 (Windows 7), Board: "Arduino/Genuino Mega or Mega 2560, ATmega2560 (Mega 2560)"
Sketch uses 1460 bytes (0%) of program storage space. Maximum is 253952 bytes.
Global variables use 9 bytes (0%) of dynamic memory, leaving 8183 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 8192 bytes.
avrdude: warning: cannot set sck period. please check for usbasp firmware update.
avrdude: error: program enable: target doesn't answer. 1
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
this check.
the selected serial port
does not exist or your board is not connected
.