I managed to brick one of my only two xBees. I need spares, but until they arrive I've been trying all the standard and not-so-standard solutions. In all cases X-CTU tells me it can't connect to the com port, and that's the way it acts. I tried forcing the comm port with the solution offered on youtube, but never got a connection
I've measured the voltage on my reset pin with just the xbee powered and dout/din connected to tx/rx respectively and it's 0.0 to ground. I suspect this is bad news.
Xbees are fragile, with 3.3V devices in 5V systems, it's easy to blow them. 5V gets on
the wrong pin, and you have toast. It doesn't help that most of the shields are so
poorly designed that this can easily happen.
What does this mean? --> "measured the voltage on my reset pin". What's that got to
do with anything? If anything, it sounds like your Arduino is bricked. ???
Seems to me a reset pin would have to be high to provide a reset when it's grounded.
I'm using the sparkfun explorer regulated, which does seem a bit lame, only the din and dout pins have their voltage converted, but I've been careful to only use two 1.5 volt batteries as my power source and this was the transmitter that bricked, which has it's DI pins connected to five switches which pull them low (gnd). I wouldn't have been as surprised if it was the reciever that bricked since the corresponding five pins (d0-d4) connect to the arduino, but I set them high (DOH (5)) in the xBee configuration and read them as input, and the rcvr is still working fine. I think in the final version of the thingy I'm building that I'll use a adruino pro 3.3v to be on the safe side.
I am using a FTDI adapter to program them (with the di/dout pins reversed to match the xBee) which would deliver 5 V to the xBee, but I leave them on the regulated board.
the transmitter was still working in the bricked state, I just couldn't reconfigure it. But my various reset attempts did manage to kill whatever programming was on the transmitter, except for sample rate--it's now transmitting a nice and continuous array of zeros.
Anyway, nuttin's working so far. Guess I'll have to go surfing.
This is still making no sense to me, without seeing schematics, hookup diagrams, what
reset to connected to, on and on. Good luck.