Have I blown my board in Tanzania?

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

Dear Forum,
I am working on a project which uses the Adafruit Datalogger (ladyada.net/make/logshield/index.html) to remotely log pressure of a biodigester in Tanzania. I soldered up the logger shield and set it going with my Arduino Uno, everything was fine and I was getting good data for a couple of days.
Then I plugged the board into a 12V SLA battery (open circuit voltage of around 13.5V) and bad things happened. The board felt warm around the power jack (particularly on the solder pads beneath it) so I quickly unplugged it. I then tried plugging it back into my USB 5V and the sketch did not run.

I then tried communicating the board (without the datalogger shield) and uploading a blink sketch and received the following error and the could not upload a sketch.
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00

I thought that I'd blown the chip so replaced it with a spare ATMega328 and received the same error message. I've spent some time looking through forums regarding this error message and tried many of things on this page (http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1248528012/all) but to no avail.

So perhaps I've blown some non-chip component on the board. Is there any way I can test for this? Can anyone offer a reason why plugging into a 13V source would cause such trouble (I found that the board has possible Voltage input up to 20V)?

I'd appreciate any insight here, as I really need to get this thing working as soon as possible and spare parts are a long way off! I only have a Arduino Mega board here and can't quite figure out how to interface that with my datalogger shield...

Many thanks,

Oliver

2

open circuit voltage of around 13.5V

That's a bit high but should be OK for a while I would think.

replaced it with a spare ATMega328 and received the same error message.

Does the new Mega have the bootloader installed?

I found that the board has possible Voltage input up to 20V

I think it does say 20v somewhere but we normally suggest 12v is more than enough.

perhaps I've blown some non-chip component on the board.

Possibly the regulator, but as I said if you didn't plug it in for long I doubt it.

Is there any way I can test for this?

Start poking around with a volt meter and a schematic.

Rob

3

This solution worked for me:

Before uploading:

  1. Disconnect all earths to the board. (Ie the GND wires going into your board - disconnecting your board)

  2. Reset the Board

  3. Upload

  4. Connect Ground (manually poke the wire back in)

  5. Reset.

I hope it helps.

Regards,

4

Are you sure you had the polarity of the power right? 12.6vdc at rest or the maximum 15.6vdc potential that a lead acid battery may have during charging should not damage the arduino voltage regulator.

However, regardless of what you want to hook up to a battery, fusing is very important. My guess is that any 0.5A fast blow fuse would have done the trick and sacrificed itself before your board got damaged. But the main reason to fuse wires and so on is to prevent fires in case there is a short to GND.