13 September 2012

HVPP fusebit doctor for AVR's

Great job did these Polish guys that created the High Voltage Parallel Programmer (HVPP) for Atmel AVR microcontrollers. HVP programming is the only way to regain control of an AVR uC that has received wrong "fuse" settings, like I did with RSTDISBL=on.

An OM asked me to program a couple of ATmega32, he sent them over but they were not reacting to my serial programmer. A quick check with the Engbedded AVR Fuse calculator swapping high and low fuse bytes suggested that the previous owner had mixed them up, locking the chip to HVPP.

So I built the Polish circuit using an ATmega168 as the fusebit doctor on the protoboard. Pictures show the mess of wires, but it worked nevertheless. While I was at it I also recovered my locked 2xATmega168.
Green LED = chip rescued!