Re: [avr-chat] Introduction, and flashing bootloaders with a USBTiny programmer

[Michael Hennebry]

On Tue, 29 Jan 2013, Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> Pierce Nichols <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > For reasons that are unclear to me, avrdude
> > insists on writing all of the flash in order to put the bootloader at the
> > top of the flash
>
> You can give the SVN version of AVRDUDE a try if you want.  I
> introduced memory region tracking some time ago.  Before, AVRDUDE did
> not track of which areas had been actually loaded from a file and
> which not, and always programmed everything (up to the highest
> address).  Some programmer implementations then went ahead, and
> skipped empty memory pages.

I'm not clear on what this means.

When I first read Pierce Nichols' message, my suspicion was that
his hex file had leading pages of FF's in it and that avrdude was
blindly programming them into a device that it had just erased.
If that was the reason,
then getting rid of the useless FFs should do the trick.
OTOH, if avrdude starts at zero no matter what,
then replacing avrdude would seem necessary.

My recollection, it's been a while,
is that one could do something like that with avrdude.
I'd wanted to program some flash data with a separate invocation.
IIRC all I had to do was tell avrdude not to erase first.

--
Michael   address@hidden
"On Monday, I'm gonna have to tell my kindergarten class,
whom I teach not to run with scissors,
that my fiance ran me through with a broadsword."  --  Lily