I’ve recently bought a few SparkFun ProMicro 5V 16Mhz clones from Ebay because they are extremely cheap (7 Euro each) and habe native USB. The only problem i had is that i was not able to program them using inotool .
The upload issue 🔗
To get them working with the Arduino IDE you simply have to download the so called “Arduino Addon files” from Sparkfun and place them in the hardware folder of your Arduino installation. The IDE then recognizes them and provides you the new board models for compilation and uploads. Sometimes it works, but somtimes it will not upload the compiled source and give me this error message:
1Found programmer: Id = "Hello w"; type = o
2 Software Version = H.e; Hardware Version = l.l
3avrdude: error: buffered memory access not supported. Maybe it isn't
4a butterfly/AVR109 but a AVR910 device?
As you can see you can read parts of the Hello World string that is continously sent by the Example 1: Blinkies! sketch that was running at the time i tried to upload source. This indicates that the software reset didn’t worked correctly for some unknown reason.
arduino modifications 🔗
So I decided to get this working with inotool to avoid using the Arduino IDE and probably fix the upload issue at the same time. I downloaded the Arduino Addon Files again and checked the contents:
1 ├── boards.txt
2 ├── bootloaders
3 │ └── caterina
4 │ ├── build.txt
5 │ ├── Caterina.c
6 │ ├── Caterina-fio.hex
7 │ ├── Caterina.h
8 │ ├── Caterina.hex
9 │ ├── Caterina-lilypadusb.hex
10 │ ├── Caterina-makey.hex
11 │ ├── Caterina-minibench.hex
12 │ ├── Caterina-promicro16.hex
13 │ ├── Caterina-promicro8.hex
14 │ ├── Caterina-wiflyin.hex
15 │ ├── Descriptors.c
16 │ ├── Descriptors.h
17 │ ├── Makefile
18 │ ├── program.txt
19 │ └── Readme.txt
20 ├── driver
21 │ ├── FioV3.inf
22 │ ├── LilyPadUSB.inf
23 │ ├── MakeyMakey.inf
24 │ ├── Minibench.inf
25 │ ├── ProMicro.inf
26 │ └── WiFlyin.inf
27 ├── README.md
28 └── variants
29 ├── minibench
30 │ └── pins_arduino.h
31 └── promicro
32 └── pins_arduino.h
33
34 6 directories, 26 files
- The boards.txt has the definitions for the 4 Sparkfun boards with AtMega32u4 processors (Pro Micro 5V, Pro Micro 3.3V, Fio 3.3V, Makey Makey).
- In the bootloaders folder is a modified/extended version of the original caterina bootloader for the Leonardo.
- The drivers folder contains the windows drivers for the boards.
- variants contains the pin configurations.
If you simply install the Addon files as usually (copy the folder into the hardware folder), inotool recognizes the new boards, but fails to compile/upload. So i tried to integrate the new files into the original folders:
1sed -i 's/caterina/caterina-sparkfun/g' ~/Downloads/SF32u4_boards-master/boards.txt
2cat ~/Downloads/SF32u4_boards-master/boards.txt >> /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/boards.txt
3cp -r ~/Downloads/SF32u4_boards-master/bootloaders/caterina/ /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/bootloaders/caterina-sparkfun
4cp -r ~/Downloads/SF32u4_boards-master/variants/* /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/variants/
- replace caterina in boards.txt with caterina-sparkfun. This makes sure that the modified bootloader is used and not the original one.
- append the contents of the new boards.txt to the original boards.txt.
- copy the new caterina bootloader into the original bootloaders folder, but rename it to caterina-sparkfun.
- copy the new variants into the original variants folder
If we now go into a inotool project and call ino list-models we get this list:
1 uno: [DEFAULT] Arduino Uno
2 atmega328: Arduino Duemilanove w/ ATmega328
3 diecimila: Arduino Diecimila or Duemilanove w/ ATmega168
4 nano328: Arduino Nano w/ ATmega328
5 nano: Arduino Nano w/ ATmega168
6 mega2560: Arduino Mega 2560 or Mega ADK
7 mega: Arduino Mega (ATmega1280)
8 leonardo: Arduino Leonardo
9 esplora: Arduino Esplora
10 micro: Arduino Micro
11 mini328: Arduino Mini w/ ATmega328
12 mini: Arduino Mini w/ ATmega168
13 ethernet: Arduino Ethernet
14 fio: Arduino Fio
15 bt328: Arduino BT w/ ATmega328
16 bt: Arduino BT w/ ATmega168
17 LilyPadUSB: LilyPad Arduino USB
18 lilypad328: LilyPad Arduino w/ ATmega328
19 lilypad: LilyPad Arduino w/ ATmega168
20 pro5v328: Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (5V, 16 MHz) w/ ATmega328
21 pro5v: Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (5V, 16 MHz) w/ ATmega168
22 pro328: Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (3.3V, 8 MHz) w/ ATmega328
23 pro: Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (3.3V, 8 MHz) w/ ATmega168
24 atmega168: Arduino NG or older w/ ATmega168
25 atmega8: Arduino NG or older w/ ATmega8
26 robotControl: Arduino Robot Control
27 robotMotor: Arduino Robot Motor
28 promicro16: SparkFun Pro Micro 5V/16MHz
29 promicro8: SparkFun Pro Micro 3.3V/8MHz
30 fiov3: SparkFun Fio V3 3.3V/8MHz
31 minibench: SparkFun Makey Makey
inotool modifications 🔗
As you can see, at the end of the list are the new boards. If they do not appear, do a ino clean first.
Now ino compiles our source but fails to upload it :-(
So we have to do a little modification to ino itself, see the Github diff of the original repo and my fork.
I simply changed the behavior of inotool to do a softwre reset with the 1200 Baud connect/disconnect method to happen whenever the specified bootloader for a certain board model starts with “caterina” instead of is equal to “caterina”.
compile and upload code 🔗
Compilation works like a charm:
1 bouni@fnord: ~/tmp/blinky$ ino build -m promicro16
2 Searching for Board description file (boards.txt) ... /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/boards.txt
3 Searching for Arduino lib version file (version.txt) ... /usr/share/arduino/lib/version.txt
4 Detecting Arduino software version ... 1.0.5 (1.0.5)
5 Searching for Arduino core library ... /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/cores/arduino
6 Searching for Arduino standard libraries ... /usr/share/arduino/libraries
7 Searching for Arduino variants directory ... /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/variants
8 Searching for make ... /usr/bin/make
9 Searching for avr-gcc ... /usr/bin/avr-gcc
10 Searching for avr-g++ ... /usr/bin/avr-g++
11 Searching for avr-ar ... /usr/bin/avr-ar
12 Searching for avr-objcopy ... /usr/bin/avr-objcopy
13 src/sketch.ino
14 Searching for Arduino lib version file (version.txt) ... /usr/share/arduino/lib/version.txt
15 Detecting Arduino software version ... 1.0.5 (1.0.5)
16 Scanning dependencies of src
17 Scanning dependencies of arduino
18 src/sketch.cpp
19 arduino/wiring_shift.c
20 arduino/WInterrupts.c
21 arduino/wiring_digital.c
22 arduino/wiring_pulse.c
23 arduino/wiring.c
24 arduino/wiring_analog.c
25 arduino/avr-libc/malloc.c
26 arduino/avr-libc/realloc.c
27 arduino/IPAddress.cpp
28 arduino/Stream.cpp
29 arduino/WString.cpp
30 arduino/Print.cpp
31 arduino/Tone.cpp
32 arduino/USBCore.cpp
33 arduino/HID.cpp
34 arduino/main.cpp
35 arduino/HardwareSerial.cpp
36 arduino/WMath.cpp
37 arduino/new.cpp
38 arduino/CDC.cpp
39 Linking libarduino.a
40 Linking firmware.elf
41 Converting to firmware.hex
And upload also:
1 bouni@fnord: ~/tmp/blinky$ ino upload -m promicro16
2 Guessing serial port ... /dev/ttyACM0
3
4 Connecting to programmer: .
5 Found programmer: Id = "CATERIN"; type = S
6 Software Version = 1.0; No Hardware Version given.
7 Programmer supports auto addr increment.
8 Programmer supports buffered memory access with buffersize=128 bytes.
9
10 Programmer supports the following devices:
11 Device code: 0x44
12
13 avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions
14
15 Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.00s
16
17 avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e9587
18 avrdude: reading input file ".build/promicro16/firmware.hex"
19 avrdude: writing flash (6076 bytes):
20
21 Writing | ################################################## | 100% 0.48s
22
23 avrdude: 6076 bytes of flash written
24 avrdude: verifying flash memory against .build/promicro16/firmware.hex:
25 avrdude: load data flash data from input file .build/promicro16/firmware.hex:
26 avrdude: input file .build/promicro16/firmware.hex contains 6076 bytes
27 avrdude: reading on-chip flash data:
28
29 Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.05s
30
31 avrdude: verifying ...
32 avrdude: 6076 bytes of flash verified
33
34 avrdude: safemode: Fuses OK (H:CB, E:D8, L:FF)
35
36 avrdude done. Thank you.