Problems loading sketches into new Arduino Mega

As I said in a previous post, It looks like a standard Arduino just doesn’t have enough memory, so I found an Arduino Mega, which is based on the ATMega 1280 rather than the 328.

However, when I got the Mega from MakerBot Industries, it refused to accept any new program uploads.  Every time I tried I got:

avrdude: stk500_2_ReceiveMessage(): timeout

Read how I fixed it after the break.

It turns out that MakerBot ships their Mega’s with the auto-reset feature disabled.  You can fix this one of two ways:

  1. Manually hit reset just before (< 1 second) you begin to upload your sketch.
  2. Put a little blob of solder across the two pads labeled “RESET-EN“.

I chose #2 , and voilà, new sketches load fine.

The very first messages from the GruePhone Brains:

Welcome to GruePhone.
SD Card initialized
Failed to open story file zork1.dat
You have been eaten by the GruePhone!

D’oh! I got the test for whether the file exists backwards!  Now that is fixed…. but memory problems persist., but more about that in future posts.

2 Comments

  • Lee says:

    Hi,

    wanted to ask is it putting the blob of solder inside the square area labeled RESET_EN? can u load a pic for Arduino Mega 2560?

    I heard soldering a 100nF capacitor would work too, but not sure where. Hope you can help.

    Thank You.

    Regards,
    Lee

  • admin says:

    I don’t actually have an Arduino Mega 2560, but the original Mega. (with the ATMega 1280 chip,.) I also believe that the Arduino Mega 2560 uses an entirely different interface mechanism (somewhat like the Arduino Uno) and therefore probably doesn’t even have the RESET_EN pads I mentioned.

    Sorry I can’t be of more help

    — Mitch

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