ATMega328P “AVRDude: Could not find USBTiny Device (0x1781/0xc9f)”

Good afternoon,

I recently assembled an ATMega328P based micro-controller PCB of my own design. I feel good about the circuit itself as I managed to upload the Arduino Blink sketch via the Sparkfun AVR Pocket Programmer.

After uploading this sketch I noted that the ATMega was using its internal oscillator. I didn’t feel comfortable changing fuse bits I attempted to install the Arduino boot loader again through the Arduino IDE.

At this point a number of errors were thrown but the board started to use it’s external clock and run the Blink program correctly.

I can no longer however upload any further code to the chip, since I couldn’t get AVRDude to work on my Mac, I installed AVRDude 5.1 on my Windows 8.1 PC.

I then connected the device and sent:

avrdude -c usbtiny -p atmega328p

This simply returned:

avrdude: Error: Could not find USBtiny device ( 0x1781/0xc9f)

Have I inadvertently skewed with the chip’s fuse bits? How can I save this chip??

UPDATE: I managed to install AVRDude 6.0.1 and now the error reads:

avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1

Full result is seen here:

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