I guess by now most of us, coding freaks by now are into arduino directly or indirectly. One major problem we all have faced with arduino is the frequent deletion of the boot-loader from the Atmega IC. There could be N number of reasons for this, and I shall not get into that. I will give you a way to solve this problem and also convert your normal atmega chip to an arduino chip.(Most of you pro's will tell me AVR and Arduino are the same. YES they are, but for those freshers who have just been introduced to AVR and Arduino take them as different things, as time goes you will know what I mean)Requirements to boot-load:
1) A programmer or another working arduino board.
2)the board you want to boot-load.
3)6-7 plugs(wires)


Procedure:
step1: connect your programmer to the arduino IC. the pins are as follows:

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pin 13,12,11 on the arduino corresponds on sck,miso,mosi respectively. use this config to connect to the usbasp.

step 2: on the arduino IDE(arduino1.0 and up) select the corresponding board which you want to boot-load

step 3: select your programmer.(usbASP or if your using arduino itself select arduino as ISP)


step 4: connect the programmer to the computer.

step 5: in the arduino IDE select tools>burn bootloader

step 6: plug out the arduino and now get coding on your freshly bootloaded chip!!!
 
SJCE Mysore conducted their yearly tech event,tuxedo this weekend. A completely opensource event where students and industry people present talks and small workshops based on FOSS.

It was quite interesting to see a collage so much into FoSS,unlike the collages i've seen in Bangalore  There was a prof who gave a talk on latex a software for making tech papers. He was using zen walk OS. He also kept inspiring his students to work on linux. To add to that he has contributed few clip arts for paper presentations. Parallelly the linux computing group of SJCE had their event, various coding competitions and talks.

The college has its own hardware and software groups which conduct workshops and also attend various other events.

Our talk was an introduction to freedom hardware ,though many of them were acquainted with various technologies ,the idea of community learning was something new to them.

The session was attended by about 50 students from circuit branches and spread across all semesters . They loved the various demos on kinect and pi. A large group showed interest and came back for offline discussions.

Being optimistic and patiently waiting to see the results of the talk :-)

 
The NSK arduino boards were not working on ubuntu as expected.
 
The fix for this is quite simple,

Connect the reset pin to 3.3V or 5V and then program the arduino. It should work. Im still not sure if this was an error with the FTDI hardware, or if its the software causeing the issue. Im guessing its the ftdi driver on linux which is negating the DTR line. If someone can fix that it would be great.

But as of now, those of you who had the NSK boards can now use it on ubuntu with no issue. Just connect the 5V or 3.3V to the reset pin.