Arduino Repair
A brief note about the dead Arduino that I mentioned in the comments of my last post: I received a replacement Arduino, did some troubleshooting, and determined that there were multiple problems. I’d been using the original Arduino successfully to help test-drive my audio circuit before connecting it to BMOW, when in the span of five minutes it went from working to unresponsive. When the replacement Arduino arrived, initially it didn’t work either. I then tried both the old and new Arduinos on a Mac (primary machine is a PC), and also tried replacing the Atmega 168 chip in the original Arduino with a new preprogrammed chip.
What I found surprised me. First off, my PC seems to have lost the ability to download Arduino programs via auto-reset. It works fine on the Mac, but on the PC I have to manually hit the reset button with Ninja-like accuracy at precisely the right moment, about 1.5 seconds after pressing the download button in the software. I know that auto-reset is resetting the board, because I can see the Arduino program restart, but it never transitions to the download step successfully.
The second discovery was that the Atmega 168 in the original Arduino is dead. I don’t know how I killed it, but nothing I could do would revive it, on PC or Mac, auto-reset or manual reset. After replacing it with a new Atmega 168 that’s preprogrammed with the Arduino bootloader, it works with the same limitations as the new Arduino. I don’t know if the bootloader got overwritten somehow, or the chip itself is toast. I don’t have the hardware needed to restore the bootloader, so it will have to remain a mystery.
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Welcome to the world of static discharge damage, at least that’s my guess. It also looks like both the Arduino and the PC have been damaged though the PC damage isn’t quite terminal.
It does strange things static discharge damage does.
Believe it or not, restoring the bootloader is a relatively easy process which is actually documented on the Arduino website. You need the simple programmer (wires to parallel port) mentioned on this page http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Bootloader and the arduino software, and a compatible parallel port (at least all that in the case of windows) and that’s it. You just hookup the programmer’s parallel port to the computer and the wires to the arduino’s icsp connector (or the appropiate pins, check the port mapping page on the arduino website) and you tell the software to burn the bootloader. I had to do that once after accidentally setting up a program that monopolized the serial port and did not allow programming. Make sure if you try to program it that the chip is in right (ie, you didn’t pull it out, flip it, and put it back in wrong. Yes I did that once, which was a source of consternation until I realized what I had done). The proper direction is denoted by the silk-screened chip shape on the board.
Unless you’ve managed to screw the fuse settings up spectacularly, you have all the hardware you need to restore the bootloader. All you need to do is hook up half-a-dozen wires from your working Arduino to the chip in question and download the right software, and in theory you should be able to program it. See http://tinker.it/now/2006/12/04/turn-arduino-into-an-avr-isp-programmer/
Good to know! I’ll give that a try to revive the dead chip. I also have a universal programmer (Easy Pro 90B) for EPROMs and things, which can program all kinds of Atmel AVR chips, but the ATMEGA 168 is inexplicably not among the list of supported ones.
Hey I burnt a component on my arduino fio may because of wrong polarity of the supply,
Its a small black square component next to the usb/battery port,
what can I do?
hi my LED Always extinguish and light
my computer Does not recognize at arduino