Sanguinololu communication issues

I bought a kit from someone who hadn't finished it and I don't know the state of the included sanguinololu board. The guy I bought it from thought it had at least a bootloader but was pretty sure it had marlin or sprinter firmware installed. The original source of the kit seems to have dissappeared and is not answering questions.

I have a windows 7 machine and started by installing the Arduino software and put the sanguino files into the hardware directory as instructed on the sanguino page.

I have several issues and I'm not sure which ones are real or which are from old documentation:
1. The Arduino page says that when you plug in the unit windows will fail to install a driver. That's not the case for me. Eventually it gets some usb driver to install.
2. I've tried installing an Arduino driver after uninstalling the default one windows chose, but there is nothing on the arduino list for sanguino. If I pick something generic looking from the list the device manager shows "Device cannot connect: code = 10" or something like that.
3. when I leave the default windows driver installed it looks better and I can pick the "sanguino ATmega644p" as the right board, then COM3, but when I try to upload the "blink" sketch as instructed on the Arduino windows page it comes up with the error "avrdude: stk500_getsync() : not in sync: resp=0xed" . I know this is a common one and I tried the trick of holding down the reset and I do have the reset jumper installed (although I eventually want to remove it so I can print from SD).

So, what's the scoop? Does the normal windows driver work now and I have a differnet issue? Or do I really need a sanguino driver that I don't know about. Is it possible that the boot loader is gone and I need to redo that somehow?

I have made a couple of modifications to the board, but I was very careful and tested everything afterword with my meter. I removed the 4 pin connector for the heat bed because I was bypassing it. I then connected a wire up to the FET that wil go to ground on the power supply. But that's it for board changes (I'm actually pretty good with rework being a hardware guy, it's the software/firmware/driver stuff that is likely the issue)

Thanks for any suggestions you can provide.

When I saw this ("avrdude: stk500_getsync() : not in sync: resp=0xed"), I had the baud rate wrong. My board wants a 57600 baud. (atmega1284.upload.speed=57600). I had tweaked it trying to fix another issue, and it was not helping. Once I changed it back, it worked fine.

Thanks Yacob. I found a similar suggestion in the Sanguinololu page. It said to change it from 57600 to 38400 and restarted the Arduino app. It came up with a different error (I don't remember exactly and I can't test it right now) implying that it couldn't connect at all to the board. So I put it back to 57600 and returned to this errer which seemed to be a little farther along in the upload process. I'll poke around with this again tonight when I get home and make sure I made the changes correctly.

Does anyone know if Windows 7 should be able to find a driver that works or do I need to somehow find a Sanguino driver somewhere?
Any other ideas to try?

I did a bunch of searches last night but I tried a different one this morning and found something else good to try (and a link to another doc):

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PandPP
As per [forums.reprap.org], I needed to change the baud rate down to 38400, but also the protocol from stk500 to arduino.

Windows had defaulted the port speed to 57600 in Device Manager, so that needed dropping down to 38400 as well.

Hey presto, it works.

From this post: [forums.reprap.org]

It references this other post which had the solution: [forums.reprap.org]

I'll try this out tonight and see if I can get things going. Then I'll start working on trying upgrade to the latest Marlin.

BTW, is there any point in "updating" the boot loader? Assuming there is one installed already, are there any improvements worth upgrading or if it works don't worry about it?

Yeah! I got it working.

Somehow I'd messed up some file and nothing would even compile. So I reloaded the sanguino files and then made these two changes and changed the device manager settings so the baud rate matched and everything worked fine.

Might be good to update the arduino instructions that at least in this case the windows 7 driver works and that it gets messed up if you install something else over the top.

Thanks! -Bret (now on to trying to update to the latest marlin firmware revision)

I've been seeing the avrdude: stk500_getsync() error in several sanguinololu boards that I have been testing this week. Three of them have the 644P, and one of them has the 1284P.

In the case of the 1284P, I found that the Boards.txt file that you get from sanguino.cc has incorrect fuse bit values. I don;t know a thing about fuse bits, but I got new values from [github.com] and burned a fresh bootloader using a MKII programer. All of the sync problems are gone, and now it works on all my PCs (XP, Win7 32, Win7 64).

I am now suspecting that there may be a similar thing going on with the 644P boards. I need to study up on bootloaders, and sort this out. I know a lot of sanguino posts ask this question about the sync issue. It would be great if there is a solid solution.

There are at least two different upload baud rates in the boot loader, depending on your version

Sanguino software from [code.google.com]
Versions Sanguino-0023r4.zip and up use 57600, eariler versions use 38400.

You should be able to edit your boards,txt and change upload.speed= as needed. (not tryed)

If I find it easyer to just reflash the bootloader with a 57600 version, then I know what it wants.

Fuses set hardware parameters, including baud rate devisors and boot options.

The following is very useful if you have to play with these. [www.engbedded.com]

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Fuses set hardware parameters, including baud rate devisors [...]

Well, not directly. You can set fuses for different CPU clock speeds (internal clock, external clock, clock divider, etc.). It's only a side effect of that to have a different baud rate. If the CPU runs at the right clock speed, changing fuses doesn't help to adjust the baud rate; the baud rate divisor is set in the bootloader/firmware.

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