AVR HV rescue shield
posted Mar 13th 2009 3:35pm by Caleb Kraftfiled under: arduino hacks, classic hacks, tool hacks
While playing with an ATmega168, [Jeff] programmed the RSTDISBL fuse bit. This pretty much makes the chip useless in most cases. [Jeff] didn’t want to give up on it though, so he built a system to program it using the rarely used high voltage parallel programming mode. He used an Arduino, a few lines of code and a few spare parts to make it. After sharing the idea with some fellow programmers, he decided to make an Arduino shield specifically for this purpose. You can use this to reset almost any fuse to rescue a chip. If you are a die hard AVR person and never started using Arduino instead, the STK500 actually has this built in.
As does the AVR Dragon, which has saved my butt more then once since I started learning AVRs. I like the idea here though!