Programming the 32u4 with ISP

Anyone found a way to program the 32u4 through the isp pins on the board?

Hello.

It is unclear which controller your are referring to, but if you are talking about programming the ATmega32U4 on our A-Star microcontroller boards, you should be able to program them with an external programmer, such as our USB AVR programmer. Please note, our programmer does not power the board, so you will need to supply power directly to the A-Star when programming it through the ISP header.

- Jeremy

The problem is that Studio 6.2 does not allow you to program the 32U4 via ISP. Does not seem to recognize it. You can program through the USB port on the board via the Arduino IDE, but it seems to be flacky using windows 7. I have been trying to use your USB AVR programmer and have used it with great success for 328 boards and 1284P boards. But for some reason programming the 32U4 this way does not seem to easily work. Have you or anyone else at Pololu done it with Studio? any version

To be clear I am talking about the AStar 32U4 board, with the ISP pins.
I do power it externally and have removed the MOSFET to prevent problems with conflicting
power from USB and external power.

I am trying to use Studio 6.2 to program the board, but cannot figure out how to get Studio to program the AStar 32U4 over the ISP pins using your USB to AVR programmer. Probably need to set something up in Studio ?

Have WINAVR and Arduino IDE integrated into Studio, but find the stand alone Arduino IDE simpler for programming but it gives no feedback to allow you to verify programming has actually worked . And programming through the USB boot loader path seems to be flaky on Windows 7 but somewhat better on old XP machines. Like the small board, good I/O capability and the variety of timers of the 32U4 but am finding programming a bit frustrating.

It is still unclear what exactly the problem is, but it sounds like you might be having a problem selecting the ATmega32U4 as the device to program. If you have not already, you will need to add an XML file to one of Atmel Studio’s directories to program devices that are not supported by default. If you are using an STK500-compatible programmer, like our USB AVR Programmer, you can find step-by-step instructions in the “Adding Devices to Atmel Studio 6” section of the Pololu USB AVR Programmer user’s guide.

- Jeremy

Thanks for the pointers Jeremy, Finally got things going by going back to studio 6.1, where the JTAGICE3 worked just fine, and a co-worker figured out how to run AVRDUDE on your USBAVR programmer and set that up in Studio as well.

Looked all over the web, but should have looked more throroughly at your site :o)