Hello Everyone,
I wanted to share my experience over the last few days on trying to get a chip to flash with the Atmel Studio IDE and the Atmel-ICE programmer. The programmer would randomly timeout and when that does it pops up a message that its trying to communicate with the programmer and if you want to wait or stop. What is happening in the backend is the IDE has “atbackend.exe” which is opening a port to talk to the Atmel-ICE. The Atmel-ICE isn’t a normal COM port in the device manager so it doesn’t have that simple interface. The backend is unable to connect and I was stuck. I scoured the internet and opened a case with Microchip but it was far a few between with the error. People were mentioning the registry possibly being messed up so I downloaded a tool to clean that…..nothing. People were mentioning that it could be clashing with other USB devices. I checked my motherboard and it does have two separate USB drivers on it. I swapped the USB hub with the programmer to a different one…..nothing. I tried to connect it directly to the PC rather then a hub and multiple locations….nothing.
You can actually program with a CLI called “atprogram.exe” With this tool you can specify the tool and commands to run on it. I ran the selftest function a few time and sometimes it waited and timed out, other times it would go through.
I was waiting to hearback from Microchip, they were having me check that atbackend was on, and stumbled across a random forum with this similar error. What this guy figured out was that he was using a certain USB keyboard from Corsair. You could call this a gaming keyboard but its just a RGB keyboard with some macros. He mentioned that, working with Atmel, he had found out that the keyboard also used an Atmel chip for communication. The theory is that the atbackend agent doesn’t know how to pick between Atmel chips (identified by VID). I took a shot in the dark and unplugged my corsair keyboard…..it works! What a dumb problem to have.
Summary: Atmel Studio 7 with Atmel-ICE does not like “gaming” keyboards like Corsair!