Bricked Freeduino ?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Troubleshooting
1

Folks,
I'm using a Freeduino v1.20 on XP (and Ubuntu) .. I seem to have bricked my board. I'v been using it happily for many months until last night when I downloaded a sketch. I got the dreaded

avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
*avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51 *

error

Right now the LED on pin 13 is blinking constantly at a very fast rate despite my attempts to reset, change power from USB to wall wart, try different sketches, differnt computers, differnt jumper settings, etc.

I suspect I hosed up the bootloader somehow.. My question is, could bad code inadvertently corrupt or overwrite the bootloader ? I accidentally had a very large 2 dimensional array in there.. something like

byte song[1000][3]

I might also have de-referenced and wrote a non initialized pointer

In any case, it compiled fine.. but the problem started after I downloaded that..

Any clues on what might have happened ? Is the fix to reload the bootloader ? If so ? what is the proper one to use for the Freeduino v1.20 ? Also, I have an STK5000 AVR programmer.. will that work to reload the bootloader ? Any help appreciated.. this is part of an XMAS project and I need to get this back in working order . thanks for any help !
-jc

2

From what I understand (reading here) you can overwrite the bootloader under some conditions. Not sure how or why but I bet someone will come along and tell us.

3

I built an arduino board a few days ago. I was easy to put the bootloader onto a new atmega chip. I simply picked "burn bootloader" from the menu and away it went.

Is your STK500 a clone? Is it serial or USB but has a driver to look like a com port?

I posted something a few days ago about this: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1228502992/3

I have a clone STK500 from a HK company (from eBay)

Works well once I figured it out.