I'm building the $50 robot and its all finished except I haven't gotten all the kinks worked out, and I haven't gotten the servos in the mail yet. I'm up to the programming stage and I can't get past error -24. I know this is a very common error and there are a lot of potential causes. I'm checking every connection on my board and everything that is supposed to be connected is. Now I'm trying to make sure that everything that isn't supposed to be connected isn't. I plugged the battery in and touched one side of my multimeter to gnd and started checking each pin for a charge where there shouldn't be one. Everything checked out fine with the possible exception of pin1. For some reason, it has a positive charge of 5v. I don't know if this is something that is supposed to be happening or not. Can someone confirm that this should or should not be happening?
Edit: I know I'm using the correct COM port. My computer only has a single com port, and it is labeled as COM2 in the device manager. I'm using a serial dongle programmer, and the atmega I'm using is an atmega88. I set ponyprog to use COM2, and selected atmega88 from the list, instead of atmega8.