(This announcement is also being posted on stonekeep.com)
Over the last 12 years I’ve been working hard to develop CONGO into the best convention registration system I can manage. Since 2002, CONGO has been used for many events of all sizes, registering and printing badges for tens of thousands of attendees. There have been many successes and a few bumps, but all in all it’s been a great adventure.
Several events now rely heavily on CONGO for year-to-year attendee tracking, allowing online registration, keeping up-to-date history, managing thousands of attendees, as well as the relationship CONGO has to Zambia, the scheduling system.
For the Staff project, I’m going to be replacing the existing Arduino Uno R3 with a smaller, more easily embedded Arduino Nano. The Nano is a heck of a lot smaller than the Uno (makes sense – it’s meant to be permanently installed, while the Uno is a prototyping platform). I received my Nano a few weeks ago, but immediately ran into a frustrating problem… code would compile, begin to upload, and I’d get the error “stk500_recv(): programmer not responding”
The intarwebz are full of people reporting this problem, unfortunately most are not finding answers.
I went through the usual debugging problems – changing out the USB cable I was using, checking to make sure USB drivers were correct – I could still upload and use code on my Uno, but the Nano flat out refused to accept the new code (and I did check the very common problem of not selecting the correct board in the IDE).
Finally, came across a general discussion about bootloaders, and there was a comment that sometimes these boards do not reset properly. After some more research, I found some folks using various ‘reset button’ hacks to sort of nudge the board into accepting code. With a lot of trial an error, I have a procedure that seems to work pretty consistently. There’s occasional twitches, but with persistence it always loads.
