Mega 2560 not recognized

Other Hardware 3rd Party Boards
1

Hello all,

I have a Mega 2560 R3 that I have had for about a year now, but it suddenly stopped being recognized by my computer (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit). It seemed to be working just fine earlier this week, but earlier today when I plugged it into my computer to upload some new code, my computer did not recognize the Arduino at all - no "bing-bing" sound that indicated that a device had been attached, nothing in the Device Manager, and nothing in the Arduino IDE. Most of the Arduino, however, seemed to be working fine - the power LED lit up, and the sketch began running. The only things that seemed a odd with the Arduino were a). the Rx and Tx LEDs were glowing faintly, and b). the Atmega16U2 got a bit warm. Has anyone else faced this issue? Because the sketch and power seem to be working fine, I am pretty sure that the issue lies within the ATmega16U2 (I have had issues with this guy before - sketch uploads freezing, etc.). If it turns out that the built-in programmer circuit is fried, is there any way I can use an external programmer?

Thanks!

2

Have you had any success using the ICSP header on the board to program it?

Geoff

3

Hi, I too am interested in this. Today i over currently an external 5V voltage regulator and it failed putting 18v to the arduino. The board still runs fine the sketch works great and if i put the atmega328 in another board i can load a sketch replace the chip and the new one works fine. it didn't seem to hurt the 328 in any way. When a USB cable is plugged in to the board the TX light glows faintly and it isn't recognized by the pc. So i think we have a similar problem here. My question is has anyone ever replaced the mega 16u2 to repair the a problem like this, if so was there any other parts that were damaged? Being that the uno is so cheep it probably really isn't worth the time to fix it but i already have SMD tools and would like to try.