Lightning fried my Ether-Ten and Ether-Mega, are they fixable?

Development Tools IDE 1.x
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With rumblings of thunder becoming closer I promptly backup my workings to a USB memory device, then moments later an almighty flash, a crack, a zap and a crash!
I found myself crouching closer to the floor.

The apple mac mini went out, and on rising from the floor I held grave fears for all my electronics that 'were' powered up and ticking away nicely beforehand.
After the smoke had cleared,so to speak, I found the mac was ok, except for two blown USB ports and both my Arduino's had failed to some degree.
The Linksys adsl modem had also got zapped, but I have just replaced two litle smelly brown things near the line connector with 820? resistors, now that works.
My trusty inverter I don't think even noticed the event, I run on remote area power, solar and micro-hydro.

The little one, the Ether-Ten, an Arduino with SD and Ethernet onboard has looked like it has pretty much fried.
I can not see any signs of life whether I power via the plug pack, which works still, or from a separate USB power supply.
With the plug pack I notice the ATMega USB chip gets way too hot and quickly.
So, with this unit I don't know what chance I have with it just yet.

With the other, the Ether-Mega, same setup, just in Mega form.
But, with this one, the lights are on at home, yes, it does work, but again, the ATMega USB chip gets way too hot.
I was able to quickly measure and confirm the 3.3v reg is working ok and that I can still communicate with it via Ethernet.

My question is, with soldering iron in one hand, canI disable or maybe repair the USB section of this board?
Is there a poly fuse switch I can remove?

Wow, the sun shines again.

Paul

P.S. I did read the required reading stickied, but found nothing relevant on lightning, I am wondering why?

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Ouch!

Maybe you need to buy some MOVs for everything.

As for fixing the board, what package are the chips? Removing a multi-pin SMD with a soldering iron might be a challenge. OTOH you don't care about the chips so that will help because you may be able to cut the legs if that have any.

Rob

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Wow, Paul, that's a bad one.

So you are off the grid. So you're the power system designer, and electrical inspector??

I would look seriously at a very good ground system. Multiple ground rods, maybe bonded with a large conductor all around the perimeter of the building.

What is your layout like? What is the soil like? What is the terrain like? How far away is your MicroHydro? Your Solar panels?

Based on my experiences with big pulses coming in from long wire runs like 100 feet to my submerged water pump and 200 feet to Ski Lights, you need to think about transient suppressors like large MOVs, and Fuses (remember fuses?) near the point where long lines enter the house. Lightning blows the fuses in the box to my water pump about once a year. The circuit breaker never trips. These are old screw-in fuses but they protect me.

I have regular USA power (115/230V single phase, grounded neutral) and I have two hockey-puck size MOVs directly on the service panel from the power rails the breakers plug on to, to GROUND which is extensive.

I designed (and fixed...) Broadcast Transmitter and Tower installations for years, then I went to IBM and worked on micron-sized stuff.

There's a good subject here; maybe we should start a thread. Arduinos etal will be connected to stuff like 50 foot cables with DS18B20 temperature sensors on the end. Sounds like an antenna / lightning pulse receiver to me.

Stuff is known about this. One of my kids designs Wind Energy Loggers (http://nrgsystems.com) which have lots of sensors on a tower and logger electronics with 2 or 3 ATMEL controller chips in them. He has extensive protection components in these. I'll try to pull him into a discussion.

Tell us more about your situation.