Flashing Firmware for RFBitBanger batch 2 kits

Open Research Institute is kitting up a second batch of 100 RFBitBanger low-power digital amateur radio transceivers for experimenters. The CPU in the RFBitBanger is the same as in the Arduino Uno, and the radio can be reprogrammed by the user (it's open source, of course). But the microcontrollers come from the factory unprogrammed, without even a boot loader, and the normal way a user loads a "sketch" into an Arduino relies on the boot loader. Loading the boot loader into a blank processor requires some special equipment that most users don't have. So, we have to program at least the boot loader into the RFBitBanger's main board before we ship out the kits. For user convenience, we also program the current version of the firmware sketch.

In this video, Paul KB5MU shows the procedure for one board (out of the batch of 100 we're currently kitting up), starting with a board fresh out of the factory packaging and ending up with a re-packaged board ready to drop into the shipping box for the kit.

Equipment used: