FastOptiboot is a variant of Optiboot. The largest change is the ability 
to change the communication speed on the fly. This allows us to bootload at
much higher datarates. 2 mega bits per second is the maximum for the ATmega328
and works well over USB. This allows for the entire 31k code space to be
loaded in under 6 seconds. FOB is transparent to avrdude and Arduino IDE. The 
downside is that it occupies the 1K code space instead of the original 512
byte space.

FastOptiboot also extends the STK500 commands to support company identifiers,
board identifiers and crystal frequencies. This allows higher level software
(such as ModKit) to better identify the board being used.

FastOptiboot works with Ardentify. Please see https://github.com/nseidle/Ardentify
for an example Processing Sketch that utilizes the extended commands and faster
bootload speeds.

Imagine if there was a database of all Ar* and *uino boards. Wouldn't it be
great if you could ask the board what it was and find out things like bootloader
type, crystal speed, voltage levels, form factor, etc, on a given board?
FastOptiboot allows for this. I'm hoping OSHWA can someday administer the 
database of CIDs (company IDs) and BIDs (board IDs).

FastOptiboot was primarily written for ATmega328s but should support ATmega8s 
as well. Please help add support for the Mega and other variants.


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This directory contains the Optiboot small bootloader for AVR
microcontrollers, somewhat modified specifically for the Arduino
environment.

Optiboot is more fully described here: http://code.google.com/p/optiboot/
and is the work of Peter Knight (aka Cathedrow), building on work of Jason P
Kyle, Spiff, and Ladyada.  Arduino-specific modification are by Bill
Westfield (aka WestfW)

Arduino-specific issues are tracked as part of the Arduino project
at http://code.google.com/p/arduino


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Building optiboot for Arduino.

Production builds of optiboot for Arduino are done on a Mac in "unix mode"
using CrossPack-AVR-20100115.  CrossPack tracks WINAVR (for windows), which
is just a package of avr-gcc and related utilities, so similar builds should
work on Windows or Linux systems.

One of the Arduino-specific changes is modifications to the makefile to
allow building optiboot using only the tools installed as part of the
Arduino environment, or the Arduino source development tree.  All three
build procedures should yield identical binaries (.hex files) (although
this may change if compiler versions drift apart between CrossPack and
the Arduino IDE.)


Building Optiboot in the Arduino IDE Install.

Work in the .../hardware/arduino/bootloaders/optiboot/ and use the
"omake <targets>" command, which just generates a command that uses
the arduino-included "make" utility with a command like:
    make OS=windows ENV=arduino <targets>
or  make OS=macosx ENV=arduino <targets>
On windows, this assumes you're using the windows command shell.  If
you're using a cygwin or mingw shell, or have one of those in your
path, the build will probably break due to slash vs backslash issues.
On a Mac, if you have the developer tools installed, you can use the
Apple-supplied version of make.
The makefile uses relative paths ("../../../tools/" and such) to find
the programs it needs, so you need to work in the existing optiboot
directory (or something created at the same "level") for it to work.


Building Optiboot in the Arduino Source Development Install.

In this case, there is no special shell script, and you're assumed to
have "make" installed somewhere in your path.
Build the Arduino source ("ant build") to unpack the tools into the
expected directory.
Work in Arduino/hardware/arduino/bootloaders/optiboot and use
    make OS=windows ENV=arduinodev <targets>
or  make OS=macosx ENV=arduinodev <targets>


Programming Chips Using the _isp Targets

The CPU targets have corresponding ISP targets that will actuall
program the bootloader into a chip. "atmega328_isp" for the atmega328,
for example.  These will set the fuses and lock bits as appropriate as
well as uploading the bootloader code.

The makefiles default to using a USB programmer, but you can use
a serial programmer like ArduinoISP by changing the appropriate
variables when you invoke make:

   make ISPTOOL=stk500v1 ISPPORT=/dev/tty.usbserial-A20e1eAN  \
        ISPSPEED=-b19200 atmega328_isp

The "atmega8_isp" target does not currently work, because the mega8
doesn't have the "extended" fuse that the generic ISP target wants to
pass on to avrdude.  You'll need to run avrdude manually.


Standard Targets

I've reduced the pre-built and source-version-controlled targets
(.hex and .lst files included in the git repository) to just the
three basic 16MHz targets: atmega8, atmega16, atmega328.