Hello, I'm a total newb to Arduino and Electronics in general.
I got my Arduino and was having fun with it making my RGB Leds do what I want. But then, a couple days ago, I accidentally shorted something out (I'm not sure what). A +12V wire accidentally grazed part of the circuitry on the Arduino.
Ever since then, my Arduino's reset button doesn't work. I can't program it via USB anymore. Also the light pattern that the Arudino was displaying on my LEDs is "frozen."
As soon as I turn on the power, the only thing the Arduino does now is just display the light pattern it was displaying at the time the accident happened.
So is my board just dead? Or is there some way to reprogram the ATMega328? Thanks for your help.
Basically two things on the Arduino can be dead or rather defect. The FTDI Chip (that'd be bad) or the Atmel (that'd be ok if you have a DiP Version)
First of all, if connected via USB - is it recognised as Com to USB device? Second - is it possible to open a serial connection to it?
Next important thing is about the reset button, what happens if you shorten reset (1st Pin on the Atmel, lowest right pin if notch is upside) and 5V via a cable?
About the FTDI chip, I thought it was dead because I kept getting "USB Device has malfunctioned" on Vista. But then sometimes it would work. I just plugged it in right now and checked Device Manager and it's showing up as USB serial Port (COM4)--which I assume indicates it's not completely dead.
I don't think I can get a serial connection to it. When I try to upload another sketch I get this error:
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51
When I try uploading, I can see the orange LED on RX blink a couple times, but not the TX LED.
I just tried shorting Pin 1 w/ +5V, and it seems nothing much changed.
Easy to check out the FTDI chip. Just remove the processor chip from it's socket and then wire a jumper from digital pins 0 and 1. Then open the Arduino IDE, select the prober comm port and then go to the serial monitor. Anything you type on the keyboard should echo back to the monitor's window. If you don't get a echo back then the you need a new Arduino board or clone. If you do get an echo then a new processor is probably all you mostly likely will need.
Be sure to buy a replacement processor chip that has the bootloader already burned into it. Like this one:
I wasn't sure what you meant by "prober comm port," so I just assumed you meant the comm port that I normally use to upload sketches onto my Arduino board.
I just tried what you suggested, and I get this error continually scrolling in the IDE:
Error inside Serial.serialEvent()
java.io.IOException: Bad file descriptor in nativeavailable
at gnu.io.RXTXPort.nativeavailable(Native Method)
at gnu.io.RXTXPort$SerialInputStream.available(RXTXPort.java:1532)
at processing.app.Serial.serialEvent(Serial.java:215)
at gnu.io.RXTXPort.sendEvent(RXTXPort.java:732)
at gnu.io.RXTXPort.eventLoop(Native Method)
at gnu.io.RXTXPort$MonitorThread.run(RXTXPort.java:1575)
So I guess I need a new board huh?
Does anyone know how I can similarly "test" my ATMega328 to see if that's dead or not?
Does anyone know how I can similarly "test" my ATMega328 to see if that's dead or not?
Sure, insert it into a known working Arduino board.
With a bad FTDI and unknown status 328 chip you are pretty much stuck with starting over with a new board I'm afraid. I too touched +12vdc to a AVR 644p processor and lost 4 I/O pins, but the rest of the chip worked Ok. It's part of the learning curve and the Arduino connectors with bare wire hook-ups do tend to cause accidents if one is not real careful or unlucky. I rely mostly on good luck
