I just bought a raw Atmega328p microcontroller. I am attempting to flash it with the Arduino bootloader.
The process seemed relatively straightforward as I had just followed the posted tutorial (https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoISP).
Everything seemed to go fine and I even got a message after the second attempt with a message of 'Burning Bootloader Done'. I am targeting the device as if it were an Arduino Pro Mini.
I then moved onto program the chip with an Arduino sketch via the FTDI programmer. However, the sketch upload fails. It says that it is out of sync. I verify that everything is wired up correctly, yet it still fails. I then remove power to the Atmega328p chip (just to see if I get a different error) yet I still get the out of sync error.
This has me questioning whether or not the bootloader was even flashed in the first place. So how do I know if the bootloader actually was successful? A couple things to note:
When I power on the Atmega328p, the PB6 output starts blinking immediately. I would assume that if there were a bootloader, there would be a moment of pause until the regular program starts. Should I expect to see a pause if the bootloader is on the chip?
If the bootloader is on the chip, should I even expect to see the Atemga328ps default heartbeat?
When I flash the chip with the bootloader, it says that it could take up to a minute to finish. However, it only takes 6 seconds until it states 'Bootloader Finished Burning'. This seems like it's happening too fast.
If we determine that the problem is due to something else (i.e. not the bootloader), I will begin a new discussion. However, right now I'm just curious how I know if the bootloader is actually on the device.