ICSP on an AVR with broken CLKI returns 0x00’s

arduinoatmegaavravrdudeicsp

For fun, I have been working on a development board for the Atmel ATmega128RFA1, similar to the official board and the sparkfun one. Mostly I'm doing it because it's fun – I'm a software guy.

I assembled two boards yesterday, on both I was getting:

avrdude: Device signature = 0x000000
avrdude: Yikes!  Invalid device signature.
         Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
         this check.

so I went back and re-checked everything I could find, had a few pins pulled the wrong way but still no luck. I then noticed that I had connected my ICSP header to MISO/MOSI/SCK instead of MISO/MOSI/CLKI, which I guess is the problem, unfortunately one of the things I learnt quickly on soldering a VQFN64 is that I should have exposed pads for everything, but haven't. I've tried, and can't get a good solder joint on the side of the IC to that pin.

Am I right in thinking this is the cause of my 0x00's, and if so, is there a way I can use ICSP (through an Arduino Uno and avrdude on osx) to program it using the normal 16MHz oscillator?

Thanks in advance,

Matt

Best Answer

MISO/MOSI/SCK is correct, CLKI is nothing to do with programming/debugging.

Check that the ATmega128RFA1 is supported for your programming technique, otherwise you should buy a Dragon, which offers debugging as well as programming. You will probably need Windows, though.

Posting your schematic might enable us to see the cause of the problem.