Endless loop

[Jordan-Szwejda]

When I reboot a node with mysbootloader the node never goes up again. The node is in a loop of endless restart.

Hardware where I observed this:
Arduino Pro Mini 5v (16 Mhz)
My simple board with atmega328P with internal oscilator 8 Mhz and 5V power
nrf24l01

Software:

• Mysbootloader - 8 Mhz taken from repository with revision 7c4f3c3
• Mysensors library ver. 2.3.0
• Fuses for internal oscillator:
  proMYSBL8VRC1.bootloader.low_fuses=0xE2
  proMYSBL8VRC1.bootloader.high_fuses=0xDA
  proMYSBL8VRC1.bootloader.extended_fuses=0x06
  proMYSBL8VRC1.bootloader.unlock_bits=0x3F
  proMYSBL8VRC1.bootloader.lock_bits=0x0F

Steps to reproduce:

1. Burn a mysbootloader by using usbasp
2. Upload an easy sketch also by using usbasp
3. When the node is ready and sketch is working use mycontroller or myscontroller (whatever) and send I_REBOOT command to the node.
4. When the command gets the node, then node dies. It looks like it is doing something for a tiny part of second and after that is rebooted. It is necessary to unplug the node and plug again to make it up.

There is also impossible to perform any OTA update as it simply does not work. I tested it also on very elementary sketch which did nothing more than send a counter to the controller with the same result.

My observations:
Finally I found workaround and procedure how I could make my nodes working with OTA/mysbootloader. I guess that the problem was that I uploaded a first sketch by using usbasp instead of OTA. When I burned bootloader without sketch I was able to work with OTA, update software and reboot nodes.

I just report it to you as I believe that you deserve this because you have done great job which is useful for many people. If you manage to fix this problem it would be wonderful. If not I would suggest to write some information to warn other people from repeating my mistake. I really spent a few days experimenting with this to get to this conclusions.

Regards,
Jordan Szwejda

[acejoh]

I want to thank you for your observations, I was having the same problem, flashing the chip with bootloader+sketch via ISP. Once I flashed only the bootloader without a sketch as you describe, I finally got OTA working.