I have a custom 5V 16Mhz Arduino Uno (a breadboard Uno of sorts) that runs the grbl firmware. After the initial flashing I can see all the settings (through the serial monitor) and everything works. However, if I make any changes to the firmware files and re-flash it, I can see that the old settings values have not been replaced with the new ones. I can only assume that these values are in the EEPROM and are not being erased on every re-flash cycle. I then tried the eeprom_clear
program from Examples in the Arduino IDE and then re-flashed with the new firmware settings, after which I can see the new settings values.
I did some digging and found that the EESAVE fuse is responsible for this. However the Uno does have this fuse bit unprogrammed (set to 1). Why then am I able to see the old EEPROM settings and have to explicitly run an eeprom clear program before re-flashing with the updated firmware?