Debugging (Potentially) Broken Arduino

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Hello everyone, I have an Arduino Uno (Pretty sure it's R1; I purchased it in June 2014) and I think it may be fried. Here's the details:

  • I purchased Adalight from Adafruit to give my background some mood lighting: Overview | Adalight Project Pack | Adafruit Learning System
  • I followed these instructions exactly: Overview | Adalight Project Pack | Adafruit Learning System
  • I have been using Prismatik Lightpack to drive the LEDs: http://lightpack.tv/downloads
  • I have had this working for about 3+ weeks straight now. No problems.
  • Today, the LEDs stopped working. I can reset the Arduino and the LEDs go through their typical "test cycle" (i.e., on, color cycle, then off)
  • If I go into the Device Manager in Windows 7, I can see under "Ports (COM & LPT)"->Arduino Uno (COM3). (If I disconnect and reconnect the Arduino to my PC, it will disappear and reappear still as COM3)
  • So, my OS reports the device is fine. I open up the Arduino IDE and I cannot change the "ports" option. It's greyed out.
  • Checking the Prismatik Logs shows: Warning:virtual void LedDeviceAdalight::open() Serial device "COM3" open fail. "No such file or directory"

I am at a loss for what/where to debug next. I am close to concluding that my Arduino is somehow randomly fried, but I'd like someone else to agree with me first.

Any ideas?

2

It's very mysterious that the port is showing in device manager but not visible to applications.

It sounds silly, but have you tried rebooting the computer or using different USB ports? I've seen windows get inexplicably pissed at a USB serial adapters (and to a lesser extent, USB devices in general), and not react properly either until reboot, or until plugged into a different port (I've seen cases that still failed after reboot, and never worked on that port again, and cases that wouldn't work in any port, but worked after reboot).

3

DrAzzy:
It's very mysterious that the port is showing in device manager but not visible to applications.

It sounds silly, but have you tried rebooting the computer or using different USB ports? I've seen windows get inexplicably pissed at a USB serial adapters (and to a lesser extent, USB devices in general), and not react properly either until reboot, or until plugged into a different port (I've seen cases that still failed after reboot, and never worked on that port again, and cases that wouldn't work in any port, but worked after reboot).

Agreed, very peculiar behavior. I have tried rebooting as well as using 3 different USB ports, 2.0 included. It's worth mentioning that I had this problem a couple months back and switching USB ports fixed it. Sadly, not this time. :frowning:

4

Sounds like some other piece of software is opening the serial port, making it inaccessible.

In Linux / Mac, this is the lsof (list of open files) command, which allows seeing what process has what files opened. (In UNIX, devices are part of the file system.)

Not sure if there is something similar on Windows. Try to think of anything you've added in the past few months that might have installed some software. The software for set top boxes and older 3G modems used virtual COM ports and were notorious for assuming anything that was a COM port, was theirs.

5

I've made sure nothing else is using that COM port. In either case, I went into Device Manager->Arduino Uno->Port Settings->Advanced...->COM Port Number: COMX (I tried a variety of COM ports)

When changing the COM ports, Windows told me which ones were "in use." Any other recommendations for debugging?

6

Sounds like a bad USB cable to me.