Dead Arduino Duemilanove?

Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this question.

Purchased an Arduino Duemilanove from SparkFun and it has been working well. Using Arduino 0017 (Mac OS) to program the device. Last night it all of a sudden stopped allowing me to program it. I had been working on some code and uploading successfully to it when all of a sudden it puked on me. The symptoms are:

When plugged into 5V (barrel plug) or USB the L led flashes incessently for several minutes. This eventually stops but restarts if I attempt to upload to it via the Arduino 0017 app.

I receive the following error in the Arduino 0017 app: "avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding"

The green power LED lights but I never see any TX/RX when attempting to upload.

Have I blown the boot loader? It was working great and then just stopped accepting uploads. The Arduino had not been touched/moved.

Thanks!
Greg

Tried on an Ubuntu box and with/without the "auto-reset disabling ~120 ohm resistor between 5V and Reset". No change :frowning:

Guess I can pull the AVR 328 chip out of another working Duemilanove to verify if its a cooked bootloader.

Meh, swapped processors between a couple of Arduino Duemilanoves and the problem followed the AVR chip. So I guess I toasted my bootloader - yay - userland code can kill the bootloader. Sigh.

So I guess that it is time to buy a programmer that is capable of writing a new bootloader via the ISP connection. I mainly use MacOS but do have Ubuntu and Windows machines around. SparkFun recommended the AVR ISP2 for max OS compatibility - any recommendations from those out there doing this?

Thanks!
Greg

Quick question about the AVR ISP. When used with an Arduino board I assume that you do not apply external power to the Arduino (via USB or wall wart)?

The programmer should supply the power source.

Thanks! That is what I thought but got the opposite advice on a different forum :o I guess I'll try without external power first just to be safe :wink:

Hi pwillard,

The programmer should supply the power source.

It depends on the programmer. An AVR dragon does not provide power through ISP, it senses the voltage of the target: "The ISP lines are equipped with level converters that automatically will level shift the AVR Dragon to the target board voltage."

A myAVR programmer always supplies the target.

You should never provide power by two sources because this can destroy your curcuit.

MikeT

I managed to nuke the bootloader in my first unit too - see

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1253293092

I made my own programming cable which uses my PCs parallel port and off I went. I don't use the bootloader anymore.

Instructions for making programming cable are here:

but if you're on a Mac with no parallel port you might be stuck...

Good luck!

Thanks all! Got my AVR ISP mkII in the mail yesterday and it restored the Arduino in question. Wahoo!