I've been working on a stepper based remote focuser for my telescope. I wrote some code last year to run on an Atmel AVR Butterfly and last week decided to pick up the project again as I'd be doing more imaging. Having a remote focuser is a tremendous asset when the scope is outside and I'm inside, obviously. What's more is that such a setup can focus automatically with the right software.

In any case, first order of business was to rebuild and reload the software. That quickly turned disasterous with two dead butterflies. I use the Ecros Tech butterfly carrier by the way. Makes working with the butterfly sooo much nicer. The problem was the AVR Studio 4.13 SP2 could not read nor set the fuses on the butterfly. I tried this with both JTAGISP and STK500 based ISP. Luckily when researching a different topic someone sent me to http://www.olimex.com and I happened to notice a blurb about a bug in AVR Studio that manifests itself like this. The version they recommended to install wasn't there anymore but the 4.14 beta was and it does indeed fix the problem! Check it out over here: http://www.atmel.no/beta_ware/

I had to reset a bunch of fuses but after a little fiddling my butterfly came back to life. I haven't tried the other one yet but I'm pretty sure it can also be saved. Of course this happened on the same day that I bought an AT90USBKey wich frankly beats the pants of a butterfly from an experimenters perpective. The loss of the LCD is a bummer of course but winning USB connectivity is huge.