Advance to the past

Reading is what people did before YouTube, and I love retro stuff!

Toby Turner (Born: March 3, 1985)

An early Arduino board contained the Atmel Atmega8 chip. As posted previously, this has around one quarter of the grunt of a modern Arduino Uno R3, but we have been exploring these as replacement chips for the clock project in order to cut costs (not really true - the costs are minimal) but also as an intellectual exercise, because the chip is slightly brain dead by modern standards. Whenever you see links to work being done in this area the most common response is along the lines of "But why, it's an old crappy retro chip!"

It looked like our retro version was doomed when we couldn't get the chips to program, and we toasted a few into what seemed like oblivion with our BootLoader incompetence. So worried by their lack of response we ordered a high voltage chip re-fryer from Estonia (yet to arrive).

So after many pages of reading, and many hours of youtube (some of it about puppies - we got a little distracted at times) we have arrived at a solution that works for us! These are the steps that worked:

1. Download the latest Arduino IDE
2. Install the MiniCore from MCUdude (includes required bootloaders)
3. Take out the Atmega328 chip and plug in an Atmega8
4. Connect the "retro" Arduino to the computer firstly via a USBasp serial programmer
   
5. Select options and burn bootloader as shown below
   
6. Unplug the USBasp serial programmer and swap to the regular usb connector, selecting the following options, and program until you drop
   

Now we can restart the clock renewal project without the Frankenstein style wiring spaghetti that characterised programming the Atmega8 on a separate breadboard (including bent and broken pins from the constant shuffling to and from the programming shield). Nice!

Meanwhile the spring works goes on, and it seems that after mowing the lawn then retreating for a nice cup of tea just results in a time delay large enough that the lawn needs mowing again - so that's a bit of a pain!

Here is a nice pic of the dogs looking adoringly at Kym who is filling up one of the bath tubs that the sheep access for water.

Come back - we love you, we love you

Of course the worse thing to happen for the sheep would be a full grown puppy to use their newly refreshed water trough as a bath - right?

Isn't this the normal way to drink out of bath?

That cheeky girl gets away with so much - well, what's the point in being a puppy if you can't be just a little bit indulged from time to time.

It's a dog's life