How to Fix "Expected Signature for ATMEGA328P Is 1E 95 0F Double Check Chip, or Use -F to Override This"

If you are like me and you bought the slightly cheaper ATMEGA328-PU instead of the ATMEGA328P-PU, without understanding the difference, then you may encounter some issues when burning the bootloader. I was stuck with this myself for some time and decided to share my learnings. Hope it helps some others out there!

There are countless forums with advice on how to deal with the following two errors you may encounter when burning the bootloader of an Atmega328P:

1. "avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature.” or
2. "avrdude: Expected signature for ATMEGA328P is 1E 95 0F"

As other forums will tell you, the solution is to modify the avrdude.conf file. This is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr\etc.******

Open the file and search for "0x1e 0x95 0x0F". Replace this with "0x1e 0x95 0x14".

Restart the Arduino IDE and burn the bootloader on your chip/s.

After completing this, revert the changes in the avrdude.conf file and restart the Arduino IDE once more. Now you can upload code as per usual.

****** IF THIS DOES NOT WORK, READ THE BELOW PARAGRAPH ******

If like me you followed the above instructions and still met the same error message, do not fear! This simply means that the avrdude.conf file that your system is using is actually somewhere else. To find the location of the avrdude.conf that your system is using, upload any sketch to your arduino board and search the output for "avrdude". From here you will see the folder it is located within. Copy this path into a windows explorer and edit the avrdude.conf file here instead.

For me this was:

C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\arduino\tools\avrdude\6.3.0-arduino17\etc

I hope this helps somebody else out there struggling with this issue!

Have a great day :)