Arduino Board not responding

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Hi Guys,

I am really new to this but am having a few difficulties. I have been through the troubleshooting and looked endlessly online and I am still having issues - I wonder if anyone here can help because I am almost at the point of giving up!

I am using Mac OS X 10.7.3 OS and have a Arduino Uno.
I was able to upload to the board and had a stepper motor controller and LCD shields connected. I went to upload something else to the board and it would not upload. I have tried all sorts of reset and the board does not seem to be responding to anything at all. When powered up the green 'ON' LED is lit as it the 'L' LED adjacent to pin 13.When the reset button is pressed there is no effect to anything on the board.

I am trying to upload 'blink' When I upload with shift pressed, this is what I get:
Binary sketch size: 1,084 bytes (of a 32,256 byte maximum)
avrdude: usbdev_open(): did not find any USB device "usb"

and normally:
Binary sketch size: 1,084 bytes (of a 32,256 byte maximum)
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

The correct board and serial port are both selected i the tools menu.

I would be extremely grateful if anyone could help.

2

Is anything currently connected to the board (apart from the USB cable)?

How did you wire the stepper motor up? Did you use transistors, a driver chip or board or something like that?

http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/circuits/motors/stepper-motors/

If not you may have damaged the Arduino by drawing too much current from it.

I was able to upload to the board and had a stepper motor controller and LCD shields connected.

OK, well more details then. Which motor, which controller, which LCD shield?

3

There is now nothing connected to the board other than the USB cable.
I was using a 12v 1.8deg 0.4A RS Stepper Motor connected to an Arduino motor shield with an Adafruit 16x2 RGB LCD shield on top of it (so stacked).

This setup was working fine and I was controlling the stepper motors movement from the buttons on the LCD board. When I went to load a slightly modified bit of code this is when it stopped working. So I went back to basics and trying blink with nothing else connected.