Pulling power from external source

So I'm worried that I've killed my arduino and don't know if I need a whole new board or just a new chip. I accidentally left it on overnight with one of my projects, it was working great at the beginning but at some point the computer ran out of battery. My project uses both pnp and npn transistors so I have one line going from the emitters of the pnps to +5v and the emitters of the npn to gnd. They all have resistors on them, for the 3 pnps i think its .56 kohm and the npns have 2 kohm. And then of course I have the lines going from my digital pins to the bases of all the transistors to control them. When the computer died the board stayed on because it was drawing power through the +5v and gnd of my external power source (around 5v maybe a little higher and like 3.5 amps) this made the board not function quite right and then after not too long (I presume) it just stopped working. When I woke up I plugged in the computer and tried to upload the same sketch and it thought for a little bit and then gave me the below error. Please let me know what this will take to fix, I really hope I don't have to wait for shipping on a whole nother board.

avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

And yes. I did make sure it was the right serial port and board.

Circuit diagram, please.

Have you tried hitting the reset button right before programming? The auto-reset isn't the most reliable part of the circuit. If the board has a +5v source, there really shouldn't be any issues over running for extended periods of time - it may be something else in your setup.

Heres the diagram. Its the blinder that I've discussed in a few of my other posts. Ill try that thanks

I know its the wrong orientation but its the way I copied it and then I forgot to rotate it before annotating

I tried hitting the reset button and it didnt work. BTW the tx and rx leds dont flash nearly as much as they should if thats any indicator

try uploading without anything connected to the board.

I did. Still no luck :frowning:

Got my replacement atmega328-pu with arduino bootloader installed today. I stuck it in and it works like a charm :slight_smile:

Thank god those things are cheap, I got it for just over $5 and it shipped in about a week.

I think I'm going to make a opto-isolation board to go between the arduino and blinder to keep this from happening again. It works fine as long as there is always power from the computer but if that gets unplugged crazy stuff starts to happen and it dies within a few minutes. If instead of hooking the emitter to the +5 I hooked it into power in for the arduino that would work? If that pin does what I think it does it would be regulated so that it wouldn't burn out the chip with unregulated power which is what I think happened.