Need to flash bootloader

I am building my first printer and am down to setting up the firmware. I have an azteeg X1 and as I've found out I need to flash the bootloader before I can flash the firmware. Looking on the bay, it looks like the USBasp is a very economical unit. Will this do what I need? also it seems that it's a fairly simple process as it looks like the ardiuno IDE has all this built in. Is it that simple or am I missing something?

Thanks for any help,
Ryan

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2014 03:09AM by Ryan_M.

Should work fine

You will need to add additional board files into the IDE to know about the board, but this is not a issue. Is documented here [reprap.org]

Thanks for the reply. This area of electronics is all new to me so I appreciate the confirmation. I actually ended up ordering a USBtinyISP. I don't know one from the other but I see it's supported in the arduino IDE and seemed to be preferred over the USBasp in the google searches I did. We'll see how it turns out.

USBtiny is often reported to support only ATmegas < 64 kB: [reprap.org]

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

I was only planning to use it to flash the boot loader. That shouldn't be bigger than 64k, should it?

It's not the size of the bootloader that's the problem, it's where the bootloader goes. See [forums.reprap.org].

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Fantastic!

Probably why I cant get past this error:

avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
Double check connections and try again, or use -F to
override
this check.

Until I read that thread, everything I've read says the USBtinyISP and USBasp are equally capable but the people have had more luck with the tiny which is why I got it... Oh well back to square one. I've been trying for 3 weeks to get firmware over to this thing. Definitely the steepest part of the learning curve building the 3D printer. I come from audio electronics so this side of things is all new to me. Meh at least I'm learning something, though I have to admit I am starting to get a little frustrated.