Making the seeeduino stalker (v1) work with avrdude and a Makefile

I got one of these Seeeduino Stalker v1 boards recently, for $22 as they were having a fire sale on them over on Seeeduino Studio to make way for version 2.0. The board carries an Atmel 328 and has an RTC chip plus a micro SD card already soldered on.

When I got the board, I got an UARTSBee programmer to go with it. This is basically just a USB to Serial adapter (FTDI chip). I got the version 4.0 board which unfortunately has 6 pins outgoing, which makes it incompatible with the 5 pin input of the Stalker. It is, however, easily possible to solder 5 pins onto the holes provided directly behind the 6 pin output. Then the programmer can be stuck straight on to the Stalker's input port.

To get started with programming the Stalker I downloaded the arduino software from the CrossAVR repository on the openSUSE build service. This is a java based GUI which simply provides an editor for text files and uses gcc to compile and avrdude to upload the software to the arduino (the Stalker). Using the arduino GUI was quite easy and uploading worked without a problem.

However, I wanted to use a standard Makefile and avrdude to flash the software to the Stalker. This turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought because the arduino GUI knew that it was necessary to pull the DTR before flashing the software. This had the effect of resetting the Stalker, putting it into the bootloader. Only then will the Stalker accept a firmware flash. What confused me was that by running strace on the arduino GUI I saw that it was calling avrdude with -p stk200v1. When I tried this directly with avrdude it didn't work (because avrdude wasn't pulling on the DTR line to reset the Stalker so it would spring into the bootloader and accept a flash). It turns out that avrdude has already thought of this and provides a -p arduino option. Using this worked out of the box. Below is a video of the Stalker with the UARTSBee programmer stuck on vertically. Attached to it is a breadboard with some LEDS just to show the pins set to output and blinking.