Hey, I've just gotten my Arduino today, and because I'm kind of.. paranoid, i'd like to know how easy it easy to accidentally damage parts of the board?
While setting up the temperature sensor, I connected a resistor to the wrong component.. the sensor is fine, but after I rewired it and got actual Data, the first thing I got from serial (in before the data sent from setup()) was gibberish.. like "$%$§%)§$%Hello World! [...]<sensor data repeating from loop()>".
So.. did I break anything?
If you use the proper tools, it is very easy.
The question is:
do you get gibberish every time, does the gibberish change if you change the code, does example code from the IDE also do it, is your wiring ok ...
BTW: if you can still upload code to it, it doesn't seem to be broken. This assumes you've got a duemilanove with just one serial port.
Well, uploaded worked like before and everything else worked, too. I tested all of the pins afterwards (Blink example on every pin on the row it happened), and it all worked great.
I didn't check if it occured twice