Debugging AVR Dragon

AVR Dragon is one of those rare commodities which everyone wants to have. Rare as in that the dragon is one of the best resource used for programming/debugging the atmel chips via JTAG or ISP.

AVR Dragon

I think I had a post about using AVR Dragon for programming STK500 but this post is about a peculiar experiment which I did which saved my research group some good amount of money. While browsing the inventory, I found a box containing around 12 dragons which were labeled as faulty. On inquiring I got to know that the guys who tested these devices used Windows and so some software update did some weird thing to the dragon. So, I embarked on a mission to find the working dragons from this stack.

Setup

So here is the procedure:

Connect the AVR Dragon to any one of the nodes which you want to program. Now type the following code in the terminal:

avrdude –v –P usb –c dragon_jtag – p atmega1281  

I had a board which had atmega1281 and used jtag for programming.

If the dragon is alive i.e. working properly, it will output the fuses of the controller.

Fuses are read if it works correctly

Out of 12 , I found 3 in a perfect working condition and saved 3 x 6000 = 18,000 INR  J