Longer answer: Yes absolutely because the capacitor suppresses a voltage drop of the RESET line from high to low when programmer tool initializes the device and does an eventual auto-reset, like @pfeerick said.
Some thoughts of mine:
- double check with a multimeter that the reset pin of the ISP header goes through to the actual reset pin of the ATMega644. If it’s not, then the programmer can impossibly reset the chip, and then you need to make direct connection to that pins, somehow, either by soldering it or tapping that pin with the needed wire
- double check that you’re NOT feeding 5V from the Arduino Mega into the target board when the target board is connected to its power supply at the same time! You’ll have two power supplies fighting each other and there’ll be a current between them. Either disconnect VCC between the two boards or disconnect the power supply from the target board (5V from the Mega should be plenty to power your target board which only has like the MCU and 3 other chips…)
- double check voltages on the board to see if between GND and VCC of the board there really is a good 5V supply
- double check the wiring as proposed by @pfeerick
- note that I’ve seen that the ISP sketches / resources talk about “old school wiring” and new wiring. So there might be conflicting information around. Look into the source code of the exact (and hopefully recent) version of the Arduino as ISP sketch that you’re putting on your Arduino Mega, it should already tell you exactly how the wireup is supposed to be
- you can sanity check that the “Arduino as ISP” Mega board is generally working by e.g. flashing a known-good Arduino Uno with the exact wireup as shown above. This would instantly eliminate the programmer from being the problem
- if you’ve tried all wiring methods, all the voltages seem good and the programmer works in general on another chip then you can
- Add
-Fon a new line in the list ofupload_flagsof theplatformio.ini, to try a “force” - If this very likely makes no difference replace the ATMega644 of your target board, as it might by truely dead by “something”. From your pictures I do see that the chip is socketed so you can just pull it out and put a new one in, if you have a replacement part (that can also still be ordered today)
- Add
- if you think PlatformIO is the problem (which it should be not, seems like a wiring or chip problem to me), you can still sanity-check that by doing it only within the Arduino IDE. The core you should be using is GitHub - MCUdude/MightyCore: Arduino hardware package for ATmega1284, ATmega644, ATmega324, ATmega324PB, ATmega164, ATmega32, ATmega16 and ATmega8535 with the “ATmega644” board selected. Then do a “burn bootloader” with the Arduino as ISP programmer selected and check if that works.
- as another caveat: your microcontroller has no crystall oscillator attached to its XTAL1 and XTAL2 pins, it’s just an empty hole. The microcontroller should recognize that and start up on its internal RC oscillator (8MHz) though, I hope. Otherwise the chip will just do nothing without a clock. Possible clock settings are listed in the core