Duemilanove/ATMega328 - Did I kill it?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Troubleshooting
1

(XPPro SP2)
I had a simple sketch running that displayed serial input to a 2x16 LCD. All was running fine then it just quit working. I can't upload code to it anymore.

It seems to boot with the flashing RX/TX leds and I get the green PWR led (but no pin 13 led) , but I can no longer communicate with the board via serial either USB or pins 0 & 1.

I disconnected everything from the board except the USB and reset it. When I try to upload a simple sketch to make pin 13 blink I just get the RX led which blinks about once every 5 seconds for about a minute then the following output:

Binary sketch size: 896 bytes (of a 30720 byte maximum)

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

Did I kill the ATMega328? Dead UART? Something else on the board?

Any insight would be appreciated.

2

I hate posting ignorant suggestions, but I've encounter a -possibly- similar situation. It seems that, at least in my case, it was still trying to push LCD libraries and getting confused on compile. I know that this makes no sense, and I'm sure many are scratching their heads wondering what the heck I'm talking about... what I did to correct the issue was temporatily move the LCD folder out of "\arduino-0016\hardware\libraries", then uploaded my new sketch to meet success.

I hope this isn't a waste of your time.

Good luck. I know how I felt when I couldn't talk to little Arnie.

3

Thanks, but as I stated above, I can't upload sketches to it.

4

Apologies... what I left out was:

I couldn't upload sketches because it was tripping over that LCD library for some random reason. The thing that allowed me to finally upload sketches was moving the LCD folder out, then clicking "Upload" again.

Sorry I wasn't clear on that.

5

Ok, tried that. No joy. Thanks, though.

6

I tried reburning the bootloader using the parallel programmer and received the following errors:

avrdude: AVR device not responding
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
avrdude: Yikes!  Invalid device signature.
avrdude: Expected signature for ATMEGA328P is 1E 95 0F
avrdude: AVR device not responding
 ***failed;  
avrdude: verification error, first mismatch at byte 0x0000
         0x05 != 0x07
avrdude: verification error; content mismatch

So my question I guess is: Did I blow up the board, the processor, or both?

BTW, I'm powering with a 9v PS instead of connecting the USB for this. While the parallel programmer is attached the pin 13 LED lights up solid. If I disconnect the PS and leave the ICSP header hooked up that LED goes out.

7

I looped up rx-tx and jumpered reset to ground.

Everything I type and "send" with the serial monitor does echo, so I guess the ATMega328 is fried...

Before I started troubleshooting the problem I was running the board on a 12v PS. Maybe this voltage is too high. From now on I'll stick to the 9v PS I guess.

8

Hi there, actually i don't believe this will help you, and i am leaving this message for people who find this thread later having a similar problem:
I have the very same symptoms you describe caused by some small solder-lead-ball sticking from the bottom of the board in between of two of the usb-connector-pins on the duemilanove! Removing it fixed the board again.

9

Hey, did you solve your problem? My board has the exact same behavior, I also built a Parallel Programmer and still no success... I get the same error message too.