Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Soft-Bricking A Device

Well I somehow "bricked" one of my boards today.  I believe I must have removed the device from USB during a program write.  Sometimes the programming time varies a little bit and I might not have scrutinized the programming messages in the log window well enough.  Anyway, at some point, the device would no longer boot correctly.  It would immediately throw the Windows USB error message when it was plugged in.

To fix the board I had to reset the fuses on the Attiny85 chip.  So I removed the chip and simply plugged it into my permanent High-Voltage fuse setter and got my RST (Reset) functionality back on physical pin 1.  From there I could use my BBB (Arduino clone)-Acting-As-An-ISP-Programmer to re-program the micronuleus bootloader and reset the fuses.  Put the chip back and the board is back to new.

I will continue testing... it's fun and I am having a good time working on the hardware and the software.

Today's Awesome Shots...




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